CARE Hospitals, Hyderabad, has completed five years and it is party time for the hospital with two of its doctors invited as faculty for international cardiology conferences in the US. The top medical fraternity of Hyderabad was present at an informal gathering to celebrate the occasion.

The hospital was established in the year 1997 by a team of eminent physicians and surgeons to provide quality healthcare at affordable cost. And to mark the completion of five years of accomplished service, and to celebrate its unprecedented success, Dr D Prasada Rao, cardio-thoracic surgeon and Vice-Chairman and Managing Director, has announced free out- patient services in its hospitals at Nampally and Banjara Hills on all Sundays.

Dr Prasada Rao said the Cardiovascular Research Foundation, USA, had invited Dr Sunil Kapoor as faculty and expert panelist to the annual transcatheter therapy course to be held in Washington in the last week of September. Dr Kapoor would be presenting cases, which had been selected for "the most challenging cases in the world session."

The American College of Cardiology has invited Dr P Krishnam Raju, CEO of the hospital, as programme presenter in its 52nd annual session to be held in Chicago.

Felicitating the two doctors, Dr Prasada Rao said these two invitations signified the presence of an atmosphere of academic excellence even in a corporate set up. He recalled how the hospital under the leadership of well-known cardiologist, Dr B Soma Raju, became a major cardiac care centre known all over India. CARE has now three hospitals in the twin cities - Nampally. Banjara Hills and Secunderabad - and three more hospitals in Andhra Pradesh located at Visakhapatnam, Amlapuram and Lakhavaram. CARE has also got a hospital at Bhubaneswar in Orissa.

The Telemedicine project of the CARE Foundation led by the former missile scientist, Prof. Arun K Tiwari, has drawn national acclaim. Telemedicine is practised at CARE Banjara through an online link with the Mehboobnagar General Hospital. Recently CARE has set up a Telemedicine link with the Bhopal Memorial Hospital. The facility was inaugurated by the President of India, Dr A P J Abdul Kalam. Similar connectivity is provided to the Indian Army linking the Base Hospital, Leh, Area Hospital, Srinagar, RR Hospital Delhi and AFMC, Pune. All the four districts of Tripura and hospitals of Coal India Ltd are also being linked.

According to Dr Prasad Rao, another major achievement of the hospital was the furtherance of indigenous technological efforts initiated in the form of the invaluable Kalam-Raju Stent. The leader of India's first satellite Launch Vehicle team and architect of India's Guided Missile programme and now the President of India, Dr Abdul Kalam, and Dr.B.Soma Raju, the cardiologist who performed the first balloon angioplasty in the country and the Chairman of CARE Hospital, shared the vision of developing cost-effective medical devices to make healthcare affordable as well as accessible to the common man. They mooted the idea of creating a multi-disciplinary and multi-organisational entity to make it happen. The Society for Biomedical Technology, established consequently, took pioneering steps in bringing the advanced defence technology and medical know-how together. The fusion fructified in the form of an international standard, fully indigenous coronary stent, aptly christened as Kalam-Raju Stent.

The new device, costing around Rs 5000, is now widely used to rectify heart blocks. The total cost for the stent and its implantation would be between Rs 40,000 and Rs 50,000. The initiative drew support from the technology funding provided by ICICI. With Dr Kalam at Rashtrapati Bhavan, several such initiatives are in the pipeline.