Harvey Makadon (right), vice-president, Harvard Medical International, with Wockhardt chairman Habil Khorakiwala in Mumbai on Wednesday. (PTI)

Wockhardt Hospitals plans to ramp up its presence in the country with a Rs 500-crore investment that will go into setting up four centres in three years.

Mumbai, Calcutta, Bangalore and Delhi are the cities where some of these speciality hospitals will come up. Wockhardt now runs a cluster of super-speciality hospitals in Mumbai dedicated to cardiology, neurology, orthopaedics, ophthalmology and minimal access surgery. In Bangalore and Nagpur, it has facilities to treat heart problems; the centres in Calcutta and Hyderabad have emerged as super speciality hospitals.

By expanding in centres where it has a base and entering new areas like Delhi, Wockhardt expects to not only expand its scope of services that it offers in these regions, but also have a presence in each region of the country.

The plans come at a time when India is slowly, but surely, emerging as a popular destination for medical tourism. This is evident from the growing number of people who have been flocking from Europe, the US and Asia for healthcare solutions over the past couple of years.

According to officials, the hospitals have treated more than 800 patients from overseas so far. Their belief is that the number should double in not too distant a future.

Wockhardt’s hospital in Mumbai, catering to five healthcare segments, is now the preferred address for Europeans seeking to undergo hip resurfacing and joint replacements in India. In Calcutta, where the company already has a centre, the location for the new hospital has been finalised.

The massive investment required to take the company’s hospitals further and wider will be raised through a mix of loans and an increase in the equity capital. However, chairman Habil Khorakiwala sent enough indications that there were no plans to list the firm.

Khorakiwala was talking to reporters at a function where he announced that Wockhardt’s Mumbai hospital was the first super-speciality hospital in South Asia to achieve accreditation from Joint Commission International (JCI) of the US.

With this, Wockhardt Hospitals, which specialises in cardiac care and orthopaedics, joins an exclusive group of 71 hospitals which have passed JCI’s stringent clinical standards world wide, Khorakiwala said at the event.

JCI is the international arm of the joint commission on accreditation of healthcare organisations, which evaluates quality standards in US hospitals. “We will try to attain similar accreditation for our hospitals coming up in different cities, including the existing one in Bangalore,” he said. The accreditation, he added, follows a rigorous onsite evaluation of Wockhardt’s hospitals in the city by a team of global healthcare experts in August.

JCI standards and evaluation methods are developed by healthcare experts from around the world and tested in various countries. These are designed to provide a framework for risk reduction and patient safety.

According to Harvey Makadan of the Harvard Medical International, the badge of honour will oblige Wockhardt Hospitals to uphold high standards and quality culture.

Harvard Medical International has partnerships with 35 institutions globally but Wockhardt was the first to get JCI recognition. Observers feel that the feat would further improve the flow of foreign patients, particularly those from the US, to the firm’s hospitals.

Research centre

Early this week, Wockhardt said it would invest Rs 50 crore in a research centre in Aurangabad. The company also said it would launch its injectible long acting insulin, Glargine, in India next year or in early 2007.