Wockhardt's healthcare leap

NEXT BIG THING/ Top quality speciality care at reducing costs

Wockhardt, the leading pharmaceutical company that is also strongly into healthcare, has a three-point agenda: reduce costs, ensure quality while remaining contemporary and expand rapidly.

"Wockhardt is setting new cost and quality benchmarks in private cardiac care and also ensuring that it remains contemporary in terms of medical knowledge and clinical practice," Habib F Khorakiwala, chairman, said.

The average hospital stay for Wockhardt patients seeking speciality care has come down from 12 days to seven in the last five years.

Wockhardt, which has already invested Rs 250 crore into its hospitals will be investing Rs 300 crore in the next three years to more than trebled its current hospital capacity, thereby adding another thousand beds to the 450 beds that it began the current year with.

While healthcare turnover is not available, industry analysts say it would be reasonable for the company to earn Rs 6,000-7,000 per day per patient.

Khorakiwala says the aim of the group is to set up community based hospitals where pricing is moderate and transparent. While providing high quality facilities, it is seeking to bring costs down. As for the industry as a whole, "the company is seeking to pass on organisational learning to improve care and reduce costs."

To achieve all this, Wockhardt is responding to two drivers, the requirements of the insurance industry and the opportunities offered by IT.

"The insurance industry wants transparency, quality and low cost. This is delivered in good part by IT." There is far greater focus on clinical information by both maintaining records electronically and interconnecting all the group hospitals.

Wockhardt Hospitals Ltd, which runs a chain of speciality hospitals under the Wockhardt group, is seeking to both retain its significant position in cardiac care and also expand into a broader umbrella of speciality healthcare areas like urology, neurology, orthopaedics and opthalmology.

It has most recently opened a cardiac care hospital in Nagpur with the aim of bringing top quality care to regions in the country which have not had it till now. The group has already announced plans to set up a second hospital, this time a multispeciality one, in Bangalore extending into othopaedics and neurology.

The first hospital of the group came up in the city with the Wockhardt Hospital and Heart Institute in 1990.

It is also setting up a Rs 100 crore hospital in west Delhi with 200 beds and is conducting a study into the needs of the area to determine the speciality cares that are in demand.

Plus it is planning another hospital in Kolkata where it already has the Wockhardt Hospital and Kidney Institute and is commissioning another one in Mumbai (it already has a cluster of hospitals in the city) to serve another part of the city.