IHH Healthcare Makes India Global Hub for Shared Services, Hospital Expansion

IHH Healthcare, the Malaysia-listed global hospital operator that owns Fortis in India, is making a strategic bet that goes beyond simply building more beds. The company is turning India into something larger: a command center for back-office work that will serve its hospitals and clinics across multiple countries. This shift signals how India's role in global healthcare is evolving—not just as a place to treat patients cheaply, but as a place to run a multinational operation from.

The announcement came from Quek Sin Kwok, IHH's Group Chief Business Technology Officer, who told Business Today that the company plans to consolidate shared services—finance, human resources, technology support, and similar functions—into centers based in India. These hubs will handle work for IHH's operations worldwide, allowing the company to achieve what executives call "economies of scale." It's a move that reflects India's growing sophistication in business processes and its deep talent pool, particularly in technology and back-office roles.

This shared services push sits alongside IHH's more visible expansion: the hospital network itself. Through Fortis, the company has committed to reaching 10,000 beds by 2030. Already, the company has visibility on 8,000 beds through what it calls brownfield expansion—adding capacity to existing facilities. The remaining beds will come from selective acquisitions and new greenfield projects. The company is concentrating its efforts in established clusters: Delhi-NCR, Punjab, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Tamil Nadu, and Kolkata, though it remains open to opportunities elsewhere if they fit the long-term strategy.

Ashok Pandit, IHH's Group Chief Corporate Officer, framed India as non-negotiable to the company's future. "India remains a very important market for us because it continues to deliver strong, stable growth," he said. The company views India as a key destination for new capital investment over the next decade, betting that the country's healthcare sector will continue expanding as the middle class grows and demand for quality care rises.

Beyond hospitals and shared services, IHH is placing a significant wager on health technology. The group operates an innovation fund worth around 80 million Singapore dollars, much of which has already been deployed across healthcare startups focused on cancer diagnostics, digital health platforms, proton therapy, mental health, and sleep disorders. The company now plans to apply this same venture-capital approach to India's emerging health-tech ecosystem. Pandit described the company's existing "Catalyst programme" as just the beginning—IHH wants to identify promising startups, bring them into its hospital network to test and refine their products, and invest in the sector systematically.

Technology spending itself is being reframed at IHH. Rather than asking how much the company spends on any given system, executives say they focus on what that spending delivers: better clinical outcomes, improved patient experience, and higher operational efficiency. Kwok noted that IHH invests in technology at levels comparable with leading global healthcare providers, with systems embedded across diagnostics and clinical platforms. The goal is measurable improvement, not technology for its own sake.

Underlying this entire strategy is a concern about cost. Pandit acknowledged that without continuous improvements in productivity and efficiency, healthcare systems eventually face a cost crisis that gets passed to patients. IHH's stated priority over the next five to ten years is making healthcare more efficient so that rising costs don't translate into higher bills for patients. India, with its combination of growing healthcare demand, available talent, and lower operational costs, sits at the center of that equation. The company is betting that India can be both a place where patients receive care and a place where the entire global operation runs more smoothly.