Fortis Heathcare setting up four new hospitals

Kolkata, Apr 13(UNI) Fortis Healthcare Limited, one of the largest private healthcare companies, is setting up four new state of the art multi-care facilities hospitals in the country by 2008 with an estimated investment of Rs 500 crores.

Announcing this Fortis Healthcare President Daljit Singh here today said of the four new hospitals, the largest 182 bedded one would come up in Navi Mumbai by October this year, followed by another-150 bedded hospital in Jaipur, while the two other units would be set up in New Delhi and Punjab before the end of next year.

Each of these two hospitals would have 175 bed in-patients departments, Mr Singh informed.

He said though the other three hospitals were being newly constructed, the one in Navi Mumbai had been acquired from a similar player at a cost of Rs 385 crores.

At present Fortis run as many as 12 such multi-disciplined hospitals with a total number of over 1,800 beds in several North Indian states, including Delhi, Haryana, Punjab and Jammu and Kashmir besides running 16 Heart Command Centres following the hub and spoke method.

Referring to the huge growth potential of the domestic healthcare industry within the next few years, Mr Singh, armed with latest statistics and official data claimed that by 2012 more than Rs 45,000 crores would be spent by the partients suffering from cardio vascular diseases every year with possibly every one out of three Indians would bemoe a likely patient by that time.

To a query about the estimated number of foriegn patients being treated in Indian hospitals and nursing homes and their growth potential,Mr Singh said though no exact figure was available as most of the European Insurance companies did not regard India as a desired destination for availing modern heathcare facilities.

But according to rough estimates, more than 180,000 foreign patients were being treated in various hospitals every year and their number was steadily growing despite all hurdles, Mr Singh said adding that Centre was now trying to address the problem with foreign Insurers at different levels.

He said in order to expand their activities further and to spread out the benefits of their modern and affordable heathcare facilities among the wider stratas of people across the country, Fortis had set up telemedicine facilities with 30 leading hospitals acorss the country and was even planning to establish several low cost health centres in several far flung and backward regions of the country.

He, however, did not elaborate.

Incidentally, Fortis is entering the capital market on April 16 with an initial Public Offering of 45 million equity shares of Rs ten each at a premium to be decided through a 100 per cent book building process. The price band for the issue had been fixed between Rs 92 and Rs 110 per equity share, Mr Singh informed.

However, the company has already given pre-IPO allotment of one million equity shares to four entities at price between Rs 135 and Rs 159.50 per share, aggregating to Rs 1536.90 million,till March this year.

Major parts of the entire proceeds would be utilised for the ongoing expansion programmes of the company, the Fortis President said.

UNI