TCS, Apollo Hospitals tie up for healthcare management
The Financial Express— December 28, 2005

Close on the heels of its joint venture with the State Bank of India, software powerhouse Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has tied up with Apollo Hospitals, the country's leading private hospital network for developing joint assets in the healthcare domain. The assets will be in the area of management of patient records and hospital administration, and span the entire gamut of services starting with hospital registration, scheduling, and making patient information accessible on various devices.

The knowledge will eventually result in a product, but initially be offered as a service as is the case with most products. "If tomorrow, a mobile device has to retrieve patient data, we will look at that too," TCS CEO S Ramadorai said in an exclusive interview to FE. Apollo Hospitals will bring the domain expertise to address the whole breadth of services in terms of hospital workflow and requirements of surgeons and physicians, while TCS will bring the technology skills.

The company has signed an MoU with Apollo Hospitals where both organisations will jointly own the assets but TCS will have the rights to market and package the output as it thinks fit and appropriate for the market. The MoU does not address the issue of who will own the patents. This will be determined at a later stage, based on the contribution of both organisations. "We can easily determine where most of the contribution has come from and accordingly assign the patent to that organisation," Mr Ramadorai said.

The product will address administration and digitisation of patients' records at the backend, and at the frontend, hospital registration and patient document flow. Apollo Hospitals is one of Asia's largest healthcare groups with 6,400 beds and 32 hospitals. The group is also an aggressive player in the telemedicine space. The TCS Life Sciences and Healthcare vertical has expertise in web-enabled hospital record management and patient record systems. Last year, it bagged part of the lucrative 896 million pound UK National Health Service contract.