Lifeline Rigid to open multi-specialty hospital in Chennai

The Lifeline Rigid Hospital group in mid-May will open a 200-bed multi-specialty hospital in Perungudi, a suburb south of Chennai. The group has invested Rs 35 crore in the hospital.

A key feature of the hospital would be its middle-class orientation in pricing. Lifeline Rigid's chairman and chief surgeon J S Rajkumar said that the hospital's rates would be about 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the prevailing rates in top end hospitals.

Rajkumar said that a pricing that appeals to a larger section of the patient population benefits the hospital too by generating a significant volume.

The hospital's capacity could be more than doubled to reach 500 beds at an additional investment of Rs 10 crore, he added.

The new hospital would be the third Lifeline healthcare unit in Chennai. The group has a 50-bed hospital in the city, and a diagnostic centre.

The new hospital would be the group's most sophisticated facility. Rajkumar, who was part of the team that carried out India's first liver transplant in 1995 at Apollo Hospitals' Chennai centre, said that the new facility was equipped to carry out multi-organ transplants.

The hospital would aim to move on to a paperless environment because it offsets the human errors that happen during manual replication, said Rajkumar.