KUALA LUMPUR: Gleneagles Hospital Kuala Lumpur is on track to creating a niche for itself by offering a host of related services to its private medical and healthcare services, all within the same area.

Work has already started on the RM130 million mixed-development on a 2.02ha piece of land next to its current medical centre in Jalan Ampang here, said its chief executive officer, Amir Firdaus Abdullah.

The new phase is expected to be ready by 2013, and it will not only house a 10-storey medical block and an integrated laboratory system, but also service apartments.

It will also have a hotel to provide accommodation for patients’ relatives as well as seven local and international food and beverage outlets, Amir disclosed to Bernama in an interview recently.

"These new buildings will further widen the services provided by us," he said, adding that there will also be about 2,000 car parks.

He said Gleneagles has been continuously investing to enhance its services and equipment to move towards a fully digitised private healthcare provider.

"Last year, we invested about RM18 million and this year we will invest another RM20 million to RM25 million for equipment upgrading," said Amir.

Among the latest equipment to be intalled in the hospital is the Biplane Flat Detector Cardiac Angiography System in its renowned Cardiac Catheterisation Laboratory (CATH Lab).

The biplane system has a double C-arm flat detector that reduces the amount of contrast (dye) used compared to a conventional angiogram procedure without compromising the quality of the image. This provides a safer alternative particularly for patients with renal complications as well as for children.

The hospital has also brought in a digital mammography equipment with new image dimension and detection, a Dual Energy X-Ray Absorptiometry (DXA), which is a Bone Mineral Densitometer used for early detection of osteoporosis, a condition that often affects women after menopause, and an Endoscopic Ultrasound (EUS), an instrument combining endoscopy and ultrasound to obtain high quality ultrasound images of organs in the body.

The private healthcare provider is also among the 12 Malaysian private healthcare providers to benefit from Singapore's move to allow its citizens to use their compulsory medical savings or Medisave, to pay for private care aboard.

Gleneagles Hospital Kuala Lumpur commenced operations on Aug 1, 1996. It has a 330-bed tertiary care hospital and a separate Medical Office Building (MOB) which accommodates consultants of various specialties and sub-specialties.-- Bernama
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