The Hindu : Business : Wockhardt Hospitals gets JCI standards certification

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Nov 10, 2005

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Wockhardt Hospitals gets JCI standards certification

Staff Correspondent

Four specialty hospitals planned at an outlay of Rs. 500 cr.

— Photo: Vivek Bendre

EXCELLENCE IN HEALTHCARE: The Chairman of Wockhardt Hospitals, Habil Khorakiwala (left), with Harvey Makadon of Harvard Medical International at a press conference in Mumbai on Wednesday.

MUMBAI: Wockhardt Hospitals Ltd. (WHL), Mumbai, has become the first super specialty hospital in South Asia to achieve accreditation from the Joint Commission International (JCI), U.S. With this, the company joins the exclusive group of 71 hospitals worldwide that have passed JCI's stringent quality standards.

JCI is the international arm of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, which evaluates quality standards of US hospitals.

The accreditation follows a rigorous onsite evaluation of Wockhardt Hospitals by an international surveyor team of healthcare experts in August. "The accreditation process requires a hospital to comply with almost 1,300 measurable standards. Wockhardt is the only Harvard Medical International (HMI) associate outside the U.S. to win this recognition,'' said Andrew Jeon, COO, HMI.

Addressing the media, Habil Khorakiwala, Chairman, WHL, said, "While Mumbai is our first greenfield hospital to receive the JMI accreditation, in future all our Greenfield projects will also get accredited.''

WHL runs a cluster of super specialty hospitals in Mumbai dedicated to cardiology, neurology, orthopaedics, ophthalmology and minimal access surgery. It runs heart hospitals in Bangalore, Mumbai and Nagpur and a super specialty kidney hospital in Kolkata.

Public issue not planned

In the next six months, WHL plans to set up a super specialty tertiary care 400-bed hospital in Bangalore and over the next four years, it plans to set up specialty hospitals in Mumbai, Kolkata and Delhi.

These four hospitals are being set up at a cost of Rs 500 crore, raised through equity and debt said Mr. Khorakiwala. He said the Wockhardt group was not planning to take WHL public.

WHL treats several patients from Asia, Middle East and Africa and in recent months, the hospital has received patients from Europe.

International patients account for around 8 per cent of total patients treated.

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