Chennai IT firm, Altosys, focuses on healthcare IT, legal offshoring services

Venkatachari Jagannathan
17 October 2005

Chennai: The city-based software company, Altosys Software Technologies Limited, has decided to focus on healthcare IT and legal offshore services. And, that includes hardware manufacturing as well.

Founded by the promoters of Apollo Hospitals, the Rs20-crore company operates in the sphere of software programming, website development, multimedia, Linux, business process outsourcing (BPO) and e-publishing.

"We are bullish on the healthcare sector. The company derives 50 per cent of its revenue building enterprise software for hospitals," says chief operating officer G Dijendranath. Atosys plans to take its headcount from 350 to 500 by the end of the next quarter.

The company has tied up with Scotty, UK, for setting up tele-medicine facilities in hospitals. Scotty will provide the tele-medicine equipment to be installed at hospitals and also at the consumer''s end. The consumer-end equipment (to be leased out by the hospitals) consists of a monitor and medical probes. The equipment is connected to telephone line.

All that a patient is required to do, when not in the hospital, is dial a specified number to the hospital. When he straps the probes to his body the ECG, blood pressure, temperature, etc, readings are transmitted to the hospital via telephone lines.

"Based on the condition, the patient will be advised to rush to the hospital or otherwise. This is typically a health monitoring system for old or chronic patients," remarks Dijendranath.

Altosys hopes for an enrollment of around 500 patients to start with. Apart from Apollo Hospitals, talks are on with other hospitals in Tamil Nadu. Some of the target segment are: (a) bedridden people (b) post surgery patients who require constant monitoring and (c) high net worth individuals and celebrites for whom privacy is important.