Hyderabad: In a change of its age old strategy of building big multispeciality hospitals, India’s largest healthcare provider Apollo Hospitals is planning to focus on setting up specialty institutes to cure lifestyle diseases.
“We looked at the enormity of disease burden on people, especially due to cancer, cardiac, and diabetes. So we have built a chain of diabetes clinics. Now we are bringing all our cancer hospitals under one umbrella, so that it can integrate better and grow better. We will somewhere in future have specialty hospitals for cardiac also,” Apollo Hospitals executive vice-chairman and MD Preetha Reddy told this newspaper.
Ms Reddy, the eldest daughter of the founder Prathap C. Reddy, was in Hyderabad on Wednesday to launch Apollo Cancer Institutes — a new initiative that will put all cancer treatment facilities under a new brand, which is expected to improve cancer treatment further.
The healthcare major plans to introduce precision oncology treatment by using advanced equipments such as proton therapy machine. Ms Reddy said the group will invest Rs 650 crore for providing proton therapy treatment facilities — the first in Southeast Asia — at its cancer institute in Chennai by mid-2017.
Oncology is one of the biggest revenue generators for the Chennai-based group as over 20 per cent of its income from this area. Speaking during the launch, the Apollo Hospital chairman said the country needs to address the issue of growing lifestyle diseases through prevention.
Apollo cancer institutes in Chennai, Hyderabad, New Delhi, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Bilaspur, Bengaluru and Madurai are part of this new initiative.
