Apollo Hospitals Opens New Diabetes Clinics

Apollo Hospitals (Kolkata, India) has partnered with pharmaceutical giant Sanofi (Paris, France) to improve access to treatment for diabetics.

The joint venture, to be named Apollo Sugar Clinics, will be a subsidiary of Apollo Health and Lifestyle, with Sanofi proposing to buy a 20% stake. For the first phase of the venture, Apollo is in the process of establishing 50 clinics within the next two months, up from 28 at present. The clinics, pitched as a one-stop shop for diabetics, will offer packages to better manage the disease through higher medicine compliance, dietary and exercise regimens, and other lifestyle changes to better manage diabetes related complications.

“Over the years, Apollo Hospitals has benchmarked global best practices in quality healthcare delivery with stringent alignment to approved standards and protocols,” said Prathap Reddy, MD, chairman of Apollo Hospitals Group. “With the increasing burden of diabetes in our society, we need to act quickly and with a sense of purpose to arrest the disease from claiming more lives.”

“Sanofi has a heritage of nearly 100 years in developing treatments for diabetes and understands the impact that local expertise and innovative care models can have for patients who are managing their diabetes,” said Christopher Viehbacher, CEO of Sanofi. “We do clinical research in diabetes globally and can come up with the best medicines and products to manage or treat a medical condition. But this [the sugar clinics] will give us that context to try out evidence based approach in healthcare and find out ways to provide better healthcare at reduced costs.”

India is estimated to have over 65 million people with diabetes and 77.2 million people diagnosed as being pre-diabetics. An average diabetic in urban India spends about INR 30,000 (USD 500) per year on treatment, and the cost of late diagnosis of diabetes can mean the patient end up spending 10–18 times higher.

Sanofi has already attempted to enter the Indian diabetes market in 2013, when it launched the All Star, a low-cost, reusable insulin pen device that was developed to suit Indian conditions.

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