8401 Investors following Apollo Hospital. Share this News with them.
0
Like this story, share it with millions of investors on M3
Apollo intends to foray into pharmaceuticals
Apollo Hospitals group will, at some point in time in the future, get into manufacture or research of pharmaceuticals, the group’s Chairman, Dr Pratap Reddy, told Business Line today.
At present, telemedicine can be provided at places that have broadband connectivity. But to reach the thousands of villages that have no broadband link, mobile phones can be used for making diagnosis and giving medical advice.
While this can be done even today, the task is better done when 3G-based services are rolled out by the telecom operators-for which, of course, the government will first have to allocate spectrum for 3G operations.
Ericsson will bring in the 3G-HSPA (high speed packet access) technology and Apollo will use it for telemedicine.
But for now, Apollo will have to content with mobile phones with cameras.
Telemedicine centres
Dr Ganapathy, who is also the Head of the Division of Stereotactic Radiosurgery at Apollo, said the Apollo Telemedicine Networking Foundation has 113 centres, most of them in small towns. Nine of them are outside the country. People go to these centres and are usually attended to by doctors sitting in Chennai.
Each day, Apollo's doctors do around 60 consultancies, more than half of them are by doctors in Chennai. The demand for telemedicine is growing annually by about 20 per cent, Dr Ganapathy said.
