HYDERABAD: A hospital group, which runs the world's largest heart hospital in Bangalore, yesterday announced plans to set up a 5,000 bed multi-specialty health city here.
Narayana Hrudayalaya Malla Reddy Hospitals is being set up over 40 acres of land belonging to the Malla Reddy Group of Institutions at Jedimetla.
Devi Shetty, cardiac surgeon and chairman of Narayana Hrudayalaya Institute of Cardiac Sciences, told a news conference the group would invest Rs2bn over the next three years on the first phase to set up the 3,000 bed facility. The entire project is expected to be completed in five years.
The hospital for adult and paediatric cardiac surgeries will commission in four months from the 500 bed facility already created by the Malla Reddy group.
Modelled on the lines of Narayana Hrudayalaya health city in Bangalore, it will also have cancer and kidney hospitals and research laboratories.
Narayana Hrudayalaya has partnered with the governments of West Bengal, Rajasthan, Gujarat and Orissa to set up health cities but in Hyderabad they chose Malla Reddy as its partner.
Narayana Hrudayalaya, which currently has a bed strength of 6,000 at its facilities in Bangalore and Kolkata, plans to invest Rs50bn over the next five years in various centres to increase the bed strength to 30,000. This will make it the largest healthcare group in India.
The group, which was valued at Rs16bn last year, is building 5,000 bed health cities in Jaipur, Kolkata, Ahmedabad, Jamshedpur and Bhubaneswar.
"Why we are so obsessed with building health cities is that this model can alone can make treatment affordable, ensure better results and address the huge health requirements of this country," Shetty said.
Patients from 26 countries visit Narayana Hrudayalaya in Bangalore for treatment. The facility performs 30 heart surgeries a day.
"Twelve percent of all the heart surgeries done in India every year are being done by our heart hospitals in Bangalore and Kolkata," said Shetty.
He said India needs to perform 250,000 heart surgeries every year but was doing only 80,000 because most patients could not afford it.
Narayana Hrudayalaya, which charges Rs65,000 for a heart surgery on poor and working class patients, promised the cost would be brought down to Rs45,000 once it reaches a bed strength of 30,000.
The group, which has an agreement with the Malaysian government to treat 1,000 children from that country and with the Iraqi government to treat 2,500 Iraqi children, plans to divert some of the child patients to its proposed facility in Hyderabad.
Narayana Hrudayalaya, which implanted artificial hearts in four patients in Bangalore, will also bring the same technology to Hyderabad. Artificial heart costs Rs5mn but Shetty promised the first implantation in Hyderabad facility would be free of cost.
The health city in Hyderabad will also have a laboratory to preserve homograph heart valve for replacements in patients. Homograph heart valves are collected during postmortem on victims of road accidents.
Indians are genetically three times more vulnerable to heart diseases than Europeans. London’s Thrombosis Research Institute has set up a lab at Narayana Hrudayalaya in Bangalore to develop a vaccine to prevent heart attacks.
A group of 32 scientists is working in the lab. Shetty said the lab has collected blood samples of 6,000 people who suffered premature heart attacks.
"We are far away from reality," Shetty said on the status of the vaccine.-IANS