Philips forays into healthcare delivery segment in India

To offer consulting, infrastructure management services to health care services providers

Philips India, a subsidiary of Royal Philips, the Netherlands-based diversified technology company, is foraying into newer areas in the heath care segment in the country, to broaden its addressable market and expand its playing field.

The company is looking to enter into services such as health care transformation, hospital infrastructure advisory and remote monitoring of ICUs, instead of just confining itself to the health care equipment space. It expects these services to account for 15 per cent of its health care revenues from India in next four years.

“We are very keen to participate in areas like home health care, consulting and hospital infrastructure advisory, and we believe these are going to be big areas for us in terms of exponential growth, Sameer Garde, president – South Asia, Philips Healthcare, told Business Standard.

According to estimates, the overall Indian health care market today is $65 billion. Of which the hospital supplies and health care equipment segment believed to be only around $4.5-5 million. Health care delivery, which includes hospitals, nursing homes and diagnostics centres, and pharmaceutical, constitutes 65 per cent of the overall opportunities.

According to Garde, India has a unique problem, as far as health care is concerned. Though India is the second largest populous country in the world, it has only 1.3 hospital beds available per 1,000 people, less than half of the World Health Organisation guidelines, which prescribe to have at least three beds per thousand people.

“Our estimates say India would require anywhere between 600,000 and 700,000 additional beds over the next five to six years, which potentially throws an opportunities in the upwards of $25-30 billion. While the existing hospitals would look at expanding their capabilities, a lot of new properties would also come up. We want to provide end-to-end services in this space, starting from hospital design and development, engineering, procurement and programme management,” Garde added.

It has build a team for hospital infrastructure advisory services, including designers, engineers and project managers with vast experience in hospital management, and want to ramp it faster, apart from tying up with technology companies and local vendors.

The company is in process of executing couple of projects in developing greenfield hospitals.

As a part of its health care transformation services offerings, Philips has recruited consultants from health care background. The company expects to offer consulting services to enhance efficiency of the capabilities of the hospitals. These include helping them devising long-term strategy, improving the design, workflow, operational excellence and optimal use the existing resources. For example, a leading old hospital in South Mumbai has roped in the company to help it grow its business in a fiercely competitive healthcare market in the city.

Besides, Philips also aims to expand its tele-health or eICU programme to cover more number of smaller cities and rural areas. Under the eICU programme, smaller hospitals, diagnostic centre in areas in smaller cities and towns manage their ICUs remotely by expert doctors located in designated command centres in bigger cities. Typically, the command centres from where expert doctors monitor the eICU beds remotely are managed by large hospital chains in bigger cities.

Under this, Philips has already connected around 700 ICU beds of hospitals across some 8-10 cities. In the next four years, it expects the number to grow up 15-20 times.