Seminar to bring quality healthcare
Vice-president of GE Healthcare Dilip Sawhney addressing a seminar on ‘Penetration of Quality Healthcare in the Value Segment,’ organised by Frost and Sullivan, in the city on Saturday.The need to bring quality healthcare more to tier-II and tier-III cities to bridge the gap in healthcare that existed between metropolitan and non metropolitan cities was stressed by Dilip Sawhney, vice-president, GE Healthcare, here on Saturday.He was speaking at a summit organised by Frost and Sullivan on “Penetration of Quality Health Care in value segment” for key stakeholders in the healthcare industry.Mr. Sawhney observed that the healthcare sector was expected to see transactions that would constitute 25 per cent to 35 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product in the next few years.A recent statistics indicated that 41 per cent of the country’s population would be in urban areas and owing to cost pressure in metros cities, hospitals were expected to increase their beds up to 53.4 per cent in off metro locations. He said that various restraining factors keep the growth of the industry from what could be an exponential rise in the near future, especially the gap between metropolitan and non-metropolitan cities with regard to infrastructure, services and adoption of modern technologies.
There was a need to bring down the cost of healthcare, he said. Anand Rangachary, Managing Director of Frost and Sullivan said that the issues that the stakeholders propose to address at the summit included the after sale service healthcare and making available trained manpower. N. Mohana Murali, Head, Health Care Business Group of BPL said that the focus was now on designing and manufacturing equipment for Indian needs.
Dr. Sanjay Gupta, senior vice-president, Head-Clinical Research, SIRO Clinpharm, said clinical trials should now move to hospitals in the non metropolitan cities. Ms. Swati Chaturvedi, Senior Industry Analyst from Frost and Sullivan, said getting trained manpower, bringing in investments, popularising concept of health insurance, collaborative arrangements, improving technology at affordable prices and indigenous designing of equipment to suit the local needs would be the focus of the summit.
