CHENNAI : Business worth around $1 billion could move into India from the U.K. shortly with the National Health Services (NHS) in the process of firming up contracts for rerouting pathology services to other countries.

Chennai-based diagnostics provider, Metropolis, is partnering one of the consortiums that successfully bid for the latest round of contracts floated by NHS. The consortium had bagged work orders to the tune of £600 million three years ago.

"We expect to receive around 300 clinical images every day," Managing Director of Metropolis G.S.K. Velu told a press conference on Wednesday.

The company's mandate will be to provide teleradiology services that include reading X-rays, sonography, CT scans, MRIs and PET scans.

The diagnostics firm plans to scale up its radiology divisions in Chennai, Bangalore and Mumbai when volumes pick up. Now, the workload, redirected from NHS, will be handled by radiologists at Metropolis' Dewan Chand radiology speciality centre in Delhi. The firm has only nine radiologists with UK/US qualifications and is expected to bargain for a waiver of this criterion during the firming up of negotiations in the next couple of months. Equipping more of its remaining 21 radiologists in Delhi and other centres with the requisite qualifications is another option being considered by Metropolis in anticipation of increased work inflow during the three-year contract.

As by convention, the U.K. and India follow the same financial calendar year, the privatised healthcare contracts of NHS are expected to be finalised in March and work scheduled to start in April.

Metropolis is part of a five-member consortium with a U.K. company as lead player to be shortlisted for sharing business with NHS.

Laboratory specimens could be next in line to be shifted out of the NHS to various consortiums and Metropolis expects to garner a sizeable share of the work. According to the economies of scale, the larger the volume the more cost effective the outsourcing will be. "Against good volumes, the extra cost of transporting specimens could be just 10 per cent," Dr. Velu said.

The NHS initiative is part of a massive modernisation programme to tackle with mounting backlog of patients. Metropolis' infrastructure was recently assessed by a visiting NHS delegation and pilot processing tests have also been conducted here.

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