Advanced diagnostics at NIMS
Ensures needy patients get access to high-end facilities at affordable rates
Hyderabad: Advanced diagnostic facilities have always been prohibitively expensive and a major source for out-of-pocket expenditure incurred by poor patients. Costs of high-end diagnostics in private hospitals invariably form a major chunk of the medical bills and patients end-up in huge debt while clearing them.
To ensure needy patients in the State get access to such high-end diagnostics on par with private hospitals at affordable rates, the State Government in the past few years has heavily invested in modernising diagnostic facilities at Nizam’s Institute of Medical Sciences (NIMS).
And, the results are there for all to see!
If the modern day yardstick to measure the quality of health care services in a super-speciality hospital is availability of advanced diagnostics, then NIMS will surely be counted amongst the best.
In the last few years, the State Government and the NIMS management had meticulously expanded their diagnostic abilities in such a way that now they have the ability to conduct tests on at least 10,000 patient samples for all of its medical departments in a single day.
The quality of healthcare services at NIMS is among the best in country.
A Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) in a corporate hospital in the country will cost anywhere between Rs 15 lakh and Rs 35 lakh. However, the diagnostic facilities at NIMS have brought down the cost to just Rs 9.5 lakh, which is also covered under Aarogyasri health insurance scheme.
“Thanks to the State government and even philanthropists, we have been able to attract a lot of investments on diagnostic facilities in the last one year or so. Under single roof, we can now provide almost all the diagnostic facilities that are presently available,” Dr K Manohar, Director NIMS, said.
The fifth, sixth and the seventh floor of the Millennium Block in NIMS campus is literally the nerve centre for advanced diagnostics, as high-end laboratories spread across the three floors handle samples of patients all through the day, without a break.
The Combined Advanced Laboratory (CAL) houses the advanced diagnostic equipment for biochemistry, pathology and microbiology on the entire fifth floor of the block. The unique and only stem cell laboratory in Telangana State on the sixth floor has the best facilities for genetic research and treatment of medical conditions like bone marrow transplants. The sixth floor contains a special laboratory for infectious diseases, which has the Cobas 8800 diagnostic machine, capable of conducting close to 4,000 tests in a day.
“Thanks to modern medicine, strong diagnostic facilities are mandatory in super-speciality hospitals. That’s the reason why so much investment has happened in this field at NIMS,” Dr Manohar said.
The entire process of handling the patient samples, analysing them and entering the data is fully automated. Transporting the patient samples from a health department to the central laboratories in the sprawling NIMS campus is unique, as there is no human touch involved.
For the first time in any government hospital in the State, the NIMS hospital now has established a pneumatic tube system, which comprises an array of tubes employed to transport the patient samples from the wards directly to the central laboratory where the samples are picked-up. Such systems are highly advantageous in situations like a surgery or an emergency where a blood or urine samples of the patients have to be analysed quickly.
On the sixth floor of the NIMS Millennium Block, sits the Rs 30 crore high-end stem cell laboratory, which is capable of offering stem cell therapy, research and treatment that doesn’t exist in any government or private health care facility in the State. The facility, which was recently inaugurated by Health Minister, E Rajender has so far successfully conducted highly advanced Bone Marrow Transplants (BMT) on 89 patients.
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