Bengaluru-based Nova Medical Centres would be starting 25 new daycare centres across India in a span of one to two years. In order to fund this project the company has raised Rs 250 crore through equity, internal accruals, and debt. Nova raised capital worth of Rs 100 crore through investment from GTI group and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). With this investment, Nova Medical Centres is now fully funded to fuel its expansion plan of establishing 25 centres in the country at a budget of Rs 250 crore.

Nova opened its first branch at Koramangala in Bengaluru in May 2009 and over the years it has shown a very steady growth. Speaking about the plans of the company, Dr Mahesh Reddy, co-founder and director, Nova Medical Centres informed they are going to start with 25 new day care centres across India that would help them in achieving a pan India presence.

“With the help of our investment, we plan to expand ourselves in all metro's and tier two cities of the country. We have already completed work of our second Bengaluru daycare centre at Sadashivnagar and will be open it on June 2nd this year,” Dr Reddy averred.

Girish Rao, managing director and CEO, Nova Medical Centre informed that apart from the Bengaluru centre, Nova is planning to open centres in Mumbai and Delhi shortly. Nova is in process of setting up five day care centres each in Mumbai as well as in Delhi. “Two centres in Mumbai, one near Tardeo and the other in Chembur are nearing completion and they would be functioning by September this year,” informed Rao. Nearly 10 crore has been invested till now in each of the daycare centres in Mumbai.

The concept of daycare centre is totally new in India, and thus does not have any regulatory body or norms to control it. The company informed that it plans to conduct meeting in future with some international regulatory association in the US and the UK on setting up a regulatory body in India to provide training and certification for the doctors who work in the daycare centres.

Each daycare centre would be built in an area between 10,000 to 14,000 square feet and would deal with 30 to 50 patients a day. A typical centre will have about 40 surgeons at every centre and all of them would be hand picked according to their specialities. At present Nova centre in Bengaluru does over a 100 surgeries in a month.

Nova is based on the idea of the day care centres that is present in US and UK. It was initiated by a New York-based private investment company GTI Group LLC and Dr Reddy a year back with two third of the investment coming from GTI and one third coming from Dr Reddy.

Dr Reddy informed, “The biggest road block for setting up a daycare centre was lack of insurance companies interest. But we were successful in convincing the insurance companies about the benefits of a daycare centre. Today about 700 surgeries that are conducted in Nova is recognised by the insurance companies.”

The best part of a daycare centre is that patients do not need to stay in the hospital prior to any surgery or post surgery to claim the insurance.