Apollo Hospitals, which has launched a medical business process outsourcing (BPO) project recently, has received 97 per cent score from three US-based hospitals, according to Dr Pratap C Reddy, Chairman of the Hospitals. He was speaking to newsmen after addressing the company''''s Annual General Meeting in Chennai on Thursday. The PBO project is being handled by Apollo Healthstreet, Hyderabad, a fully owned subsidiary of Apollo Hospitals Enterprises Ltd.

Dr Reddy said at present the project was being handled with 120 seats. But there was tremendous scope for growth in this area. "We want to work gradually on this project and then expand," he said.

Dr Reddy said the hospital, which had presently 5,046 beds, was planning to target a bed strength of 10,000 by the year 2004. The expansion would be by increasing the number of hospitals that would be managed by the group. At present 60% of beds were in hospitals owned by the group and 40% in hospitals, which the group is managing.

It has entered into a joint venture with a Saudi Arabian company to set up a 400-bed hospital at a cost of 300 million riyals. The hospital will come up in Riyadh, the Saudi capital, where a site has already been identified. The joint venture has also plans to set up hospitals in Jeddah and Dammam. The group had opened a 300-bed hospital in Colombo in July 2002.

Dr Reddy said that Apollo Healthcare was also successful with the implementation of the hospital information system (HIS) for the AHEL group. A complete backbone has been created for the project by Citadel Technologies, which in turn has been taken over by Wipro.

As part of its HIS programme, the company has developed a Universal Hospital Identity Number. This system can be taken freely by others in the health industry and used for updating medical records.

The hospital announced a dividend of 25 per cent despite its net profit for the year ending March 2002 dipped to Rs 24.70 crore from Rs 30.68 crore during the previous year. At the same time, the hospital''''s revenue increased to Rs 376.78 crore during the year against Rs 322.58 crore achieved during the previous year.

According to the Annual Report the company had to pay Rs 5.19 crore as deferred tax during the year, which the company did not have to pay last year. The AGM of the company, which passed the Annual Report, also approved the reappointment of P Obul Reddy, Rajkumar Menon and T M Jacob as Directors. Habibullah Badshah was appointed as Additional Director of the company.