Medall Healthcare Pvt. Ltd.  is gearing up to expand  its footprint in the country for its portable diagnostics equipments business. The company has already initiated talks with vendors and is keen to kick-start its operations within the next four weeks.  

Portable point-of-care system promises personalized monitoring of healthcare, the market of which is at a nascent stage in India. Worldwide, healthcare market trend shows than an efficient point-of-care helps achieve economies-of-scale for service providers and for  patients’ faster access to  clinical decision support systems with  robust screening diagnostic tools.

“Our portable solutions will have ECG, Ultrasound, Blood Testing , X-ray and all the services required for conducting Master Health Checkups under one roof. Now the endeavour is to enhance our brand value by investing on advanced scanners and allied equipments.We have bagged the  Andhra Pradesh government’s private public partnership contract to outsource radiology & imaging services in four hospitals”, stated Raju Venkatraman, MD & CEO, Medall Healthcare Pvt. Ltd.

Today, diagnostic tests impact more than 70% of healthcare decisions. The  sensitivity and specificity of results obtained by these tests not only help in early diagnosis of diseases but also save time for patients and doctors. However, the challenge is to develop and implement cost-effective and scalable models of delivering medical technology in India, he added.

“Indian market for diagnostics services is untapped. We are also looking at foraying into tele-radiology sector and embarked on a process standardization programme to create content and disseminate training  to ensure  high quality service standards”,he said.

The  diagnostic service centres  have realized the dearth of quality healthcare services in Tier 2 & Tier 3 towns. These areas are isolated in terms of medical infrastructure. Medall has made headway into the towns in Tamil Nadu like  Pudukottai, Rajpalyam , Virudhnagar,  Tirunalveli and Trichy. Its next  challenge is to  create a pipeline of management resources,  radiologists and sonologists to implement its plan of reaching  out to the market.

The company kicked off operations in 2009, after it acquired the Chennai-based Precision Diagnostics. Its total personnel strength is over  550 employees which include 55 radiologists and operating  12 centres in South India. It  intends to pursue its growth through acquisitions and in this regard it has acquired the Bangalore-based Clumax and looking at expanding operations in other cities too. The  investment was a strategic initiative to start off operations in Karnataka and it installed the Somatom Dual Source CT scanner, a  low radiation dose complete diagnostic solution helpful for cardiac patients,he said.

Indian diagnostic centres account for four per cent ($ 5.33 billion) of the country’s overall healthcare delivery market ($ 75 billion) and is expected to annually grow at 20%.