India’s second-largest hospital chain operator, Max Healthcare Institute is planning to invest $450 million over the next four years. The hospital chain gears up to add capacity after the delta variant-led wave in April and May last year overwhelmed hospitals and left many Indians pleading for medical resources on social-media platforms.
“We are looking at doubling our capacity, we are fortunate to have land banks in our network in cities including Mumbai and New Delhi,” Abhay Soi, the company’s chairman and managing director said on Tuesday. “Max Healthcare is entering “a huge asset creation cycle in the next two to three years,” he said.
The investment will help boost capacity at existing hospitals as well as augment the firm’s land holdings further, while also continuing its focus on medical tourism, according to Soi.
The expansion plans come in the backdrop of repeated virus outbreaks in the crowded country of almost 1.4 billion people. Indian hospitals and the government have said that traumatic experiences have led to improvements in the country’s healthcare capacity, with many facilities adding oxygen plants and learning to switch rapidly between Covid medical care and non-Covid treatments during successive virus waves.
According to government data, the country added 238,018 new infections on Tuesday, pushing the total tally of cases since the beginning of the pandemic to 37.6 million. Covid-related deaths rose by 310 in a day crossing 486,700.
“India fortunately isn’t seeing a big rise in hospitalization amid the current omicron-led wave, but medical facilities are all better prepared now,” Soi said. “We have all sort of seen how far we can stretch the envelope.”
