Apollo, Wipro GE and Citadel are expected to pick up equity in the ratio of 40:30:30 respectively, in the project being set up by Apollo Telemed Pvt. Ltd., the new company floated by the Apollo group to implement the ambitious initiative.

While British Aerospace will initially be an advisor to the project it will have the option of picking up a stake at a later stage, Sangita Reddy, managing director, Deccan Hospitals told The Financial Express. ``We hope to announce the deal during the Telemed2000 conference being organised by the CII later this week,'' she said. The Apollo Telemedicine project is being implemented at Aragonda village located in group chairman Pratap C Reddy's home district of Chittoor in AP. The 50-bed multi-speciality hospital, to be inaugurated by Union minister for Information Technology Pramod Mahajan on April 14, has been hooked up to various super-speciality hospitals of the group in Chennai, Hyderbad and Dubai.

Being looked upon as a pilot for the total project that is to be implemented in three phases, the Aragonda experience is to be replicated in five states linking 125 primary, 25 secondary and three tertiary centers within the next six months. The objective is to take it to 2600 primary and 500 secondary centers across the nation in Phase III, he added. Apart from helping out in the implementation of the project within the country, the British tie-up is expected to help in taking up telemedicine projects abroad.

The centre, equipped with state-of-the-art telemedicine equipment such as digital stethoscope, trans-telephonic ECG systems, video-frame grabbers, digital cameras will provide referral services.