Prevention and cure

Apollo also has the early-mover advantage. Their telehealth initiative started 20 years ago when they used V-SAT (a satellite communications system) in a rural hospital in Aragonda, a small village in the Chittoor district of Andhra Pradesh where Prathap C. Reddy was born. They have been delivering services like tele-radiology, tele-cardiology, tele-condition management, and tele-ICU for a while now.

Joint managing director Sangita Reddy says telehealth was one of the things that did well during the Covid-19 pandemic. Apollo TeleHealth provided teleconsultation and counselling services to over 2,200 Covid-19 patients and over 40,000 suspected cases through its “Doc on Call” service during the pandemic. The company wants to share its telehealth expertise with the government and others in the sector. It is already collaborating with various state governments and has more than 700 public healthcare centres in public-private partnerships across the country.

Apollo believes it can be instrumental in helping solve India’s long-standing issue of healthcare access outside the metros. Suneeta Reddy believes the pandemic has settled the argument about healthcare localisation. “Covid-19 has made companies realise that people cannot always travel to bigger cities to access healthcare,” she says. And they don’t often have to, adds Sangita Reddy. She says their experience in Aragonda shows telehealth can handle 80%-90% of intensive care cases. “We strongly believe in propagating [telehealth] for the government and for the country today, so that rural India gets the type of care that it needs,” she says.

That cause will also be helped along by the continued proliferation of smartphones in the country—expected to top 800 million by next year. Still, Suneeta Reddy says Apollo will expand both its physical and digital presence deeper into tier 2 cities and smaller towns, and that the company is actively looking at acquisitions to do so. She declined to share details.

Meanwhile, the hospital chain is also focussed on introducing the latest in health technology to India. Something that Preetha Reddy, executive vice chairperson, says the sisters imbibed from their father. Take the Apollo Proton Cancer Centre in Chennai, for example. Opened in 2019, it is the first proton therapy centre for cancer care in South Asia, but Reddy says it took her father three meetings to convince Apollo’s board to make the `1,300-crore investment. Now, they expect the centre to add to Apollo’s financials this year, despite fewer patient visits over the past year.

Shobana Kamineni

A healthy dose of digital for Apollo Hospitals