With Future Group?s workaholic CEO Raghu Pillai?s demise recently, preceded by that of former SAP India head Ranjan Das and RIL?s executive director Ravimohan at 42 and 52, respectively, preventive healthcare is under the spotlight. Interestingly, of the R1,080-crore market, 70% can be attributed to corporate tie-ups alone.
Says Sunil Kapur, chief of sales and international business, Fortis Healthcare, ?While the total patient growth for us in the past couple of years has easily been over 30%, health check-ups have grown about 20%. As of now, we do more than 75,000 of these check-ups in one year, and are adding 20-25 companies from different sectors and of varying scales every month through tie-ups. As of now, 1,400 companies have a tie-up with us.?
Arpita Mukherjee, senior manager, marketing and CRM, Max Healthcare, confirms a similar trend. ?At present we have 300 MNCs and close to 200 public sector undertakings empanelled with us. Last fiscal, we had 20,832 preventive health check-ups, of which 40% were through corporate tie-ups,? she says.
Apart from hospital chains, well known stand-alone hospitals in cities like Delhi and Mumbai are also seeing a rise in the number of companies coming to them. While Mumbai?s Lilavati Hospital has corporate health tie-ups with over 100 companies, Delhi?s Moolchand Hospital has 45 companies on board, and is seeing an annual growth of 30% in this segment.
Even diagnostic chains are seeing an inflow of a large number of corporate patients. ?Labs, especially those with a large chain of centres, are having a lot of tie-ups with corporates now. Also, hospitals can only have a limited number of tests that can be done in-house, which is not the problem with good testing labs,? says Dr Aparna Jha Ahuja, GM and lab head, Super Religare Laboratories Ltd (SRL). SRL has witnessed a growth of almost 20% in terms of patient inflow from corporate clients. Corporate preventive health check-ups cost from around R2,000 for basic screening to as much as over R20,000 for advanced screening.
Analysts and industry insiders point out that with a drastic change in the health profile in the country and a major shift towards lifestyle diseases from conventional infectious diseases, both the number of preventive health checks, as well as their nature, have changed. ?Over the past five years, the number of corporate preventive check-ups have almost doubled. If we talk specifically of corporate health packages, the registrations now are as much as 35-40% of the total number of packages being bought as compared to 15-20% just a couple of years ago. Because of the shift in disease profile in the country, we are now seeing customised disease-specific packages, as compared to basic and generic test packages till a few years back,? says Jagruti Bhatia, associate director, KPMG.
?Lifestyle diseases are on the rise, but the good thing is that most of these are preventable if diagnosed and treated early,? says Vibhu Talwar, COO, Moolchand Medcity. Pressing the point further, Kundan Singh, GM (operations), Lilavati Hospital, says, ?If people don?t go for preventive care, the cost of hospitalisation in case of a major problem at a good hospital in a city like Mumbai would be over R1 lakh for three days, besides the recovery period. If compared with the cost of an annual check-up, one can go for check-ups for 15-20 years in that much money.?
But he warns that in most cases, such tie-ups are just an issue for HR to brag about. He points out that only around 5% of their clients have made check-ups mandatory for employees, while it remains optional in most cases.
Time for a check up!
