1998 – Building tomorrow when the world wasn’t ready!
Back in 1998, the world wasn’t talking about AI, Anchor links, digital transformation or remote collaboration.
In fact, even the concept of video call was thought to be futuristic.
Imagine, telling someone at that time that a doctor sitting in Chennai could examine and guide the treatment of a patient living hundreds of kilometres away.
Most people laughed.
But, my team and I made it happen.
That is one of my journey’s most important missions: Tele-Medicine.
We were among the pioneers of telemedicine when it first emerged in India. In order to provide high-quality healthcare to rural areas, Dr. Prathap C. Reddy and Apollo Hospitals pioneered the telemedicine movement in India in 1998 by establishing a connection between Apollo Hospital in Chennai and his hometown of Aragonda in Andhra Pradesh.
Between 1998 to 2004, our team established 64+ telemedicine centres of Apollo Hospital across India and even extended this vision beyond our borders to Kazakhstan and Lahore, connecting specialist doctors to patients in remote regions.
Our engineers spent days. Sometimes they flew. Sometimes they spent four days on trains carrying equipment to places that had never seen this kind of technology before. With each successful installation, a new community gained access to professional medical care without having to travel hundreds of kilometres.
While the world was still trying to understand the future of connected healthcare, we weren’t waiting for it.
We were building it.
