The Swiss based Card Guard, a leading medical company specialising in telemedicine systems and monitoring services, is planning to establish 10 centres in various parts of India to strengthen its presence in rural disease management segment in the country.

The company which has a centre in Chennai in collaboration with Heartline Telemedicine Service is in talks with major hospital chains for setting up their centres in Mumbai and Bangalore. Plans are to commence more centres in South India to cover most of the rural public in the area, while the company also aims to commence operation in New Delhi and Lucknow soon.

The company would supply around 500 tele-monitoring kits to health workers in the centres within next one year. All the company operations in India would be handled through Heartline Service, according to company sources.

"The plans in India are the part of our strategy to explore the Asian countries, where we had no major presence now. We are looking for 10 centres in India to monitor the health reports sent over by the health workers in rural areas using our telemedicine kit," said Tzur Di-Cori, vice president - sales, Card Guard Scientific Survival Ltd, the subsidiary of the company in Israel. The company has also commenced operation in Korea, Thaiwan and Srilanka in Asian Continent, though the current focus would be mainly in India, he added.

The Card Guard technology allows patients to be monitored through devices such as pocket PC, Java, Bluetooth, GPRS and WiFi. Medical tests including ECG, blood pressure, pulse, glucose and saturation could be monitored using the system and the data would be transferred from the remote location to the centre, which has dedicated a 30-member team to monitor this data, and the diagnosis would take place accordingly. Currently, the main centre in India is at Lifeline Hospital Group, Chennai, which is in collaboration with Heartline.

Heartline has already invested US $1 million for the pilot project in collaboration with Card Guard and the company is planning to invest another US $2 million for expansion in the coming one year, according to sources from the hospital. The investment would be to recruit more health workers in rural area, with the Card Guard kits for tele-monitoring service.

Along with providing service to major corporate houses in the country for the employee's health check up, the company is currently planning to tie up with pharma companies seeking support for medical check up in general public, according to company sources.

Card Guard, based in Schaffhausen, Switzerland has wholly-owned subsidiaries in Israel, the United States, Japan and Brazil. The company has also strengthened product range and services through acquisition of US companies, LifeWatch Inc., Instromedix, and Quality Diagnostic Services (QDS). The company commenced its operations in India in 2006, in collaboration with Heartline Telemedicine Service.