IHeal Heart going for IPO
Group plans Leap Market listing in the first half of 2019
PETALING JAYA: iHeal Heart Group Bhd, a one-stop boutique medical centre located at Mid Valley City, Kuala Lumpur is en route for a Leap Market listing in the first half of 2019.
On the surface, this contemporary looking centre may appear like a typical clinical boutique hospital simply specialising in heart and heart-related specialties.
A closer look shows that iHeal has some heart – the company is built on the foundation that everyone is responsible for one’s health, and that this healthcare is accessible to all.
Since its founder Dr David Khoo Sin Keat founded the centre in 2010, the underlying principles have been centred on prevention.
Khoo’s focus is preventive medicine, based on the belief that business in the 21st century is about impacting society, while the sustainability of the business is about impacting the greater part of society. Thus, part of iHeal’s focus is on the business of heartcare instead of sickcare.
“The heart is without a doubt one of our most important organs. What is for certain is that if you don’t have a strong heart, you will not be able to live long. Nowadays, if you literally do not have a good heart, you cannot live long also,” laughs Khoo, who has some three decades of experience under his belt, both in private and government service.
It is this holistic approach that has enabled iHeal’s number of patients to grow by 20% to 30% a year. To date, iHeal has treated and impacted the lives of patients from 70 countries, with some 68,000 patient visits recorded.
Out of this, some 6,700 patients are foreigners. In the Indonesian archipelago, iHeal is a household name in the cities of Jakarta, Surabaya and Palembang.
iHeal has performed more than 2,000 of less invasive by-pass surgeries since its inception, thus being renowned as the only dedicated centre for such surgery in Malaysia.
iHeal has since garnered government contracts from Timor-Leste and Nauru, aside from patients from Indonesia and other countries.
In 2014, iHeal signed a five-year agreement with the prime minister of Timor Leste as the exclusive heart health service provider from Malaysia. iHeal has since treated over 130 Timorese and conducted over 46 heart operations.
It is in the plan to assist the nation to plan, build and operate a heart hospital in the capital Dili.
Subsequently iHeal signed a similar healthcare service agreement with Nauru and treated its first patients on Sept 17, 2017.
“Our next quantum of growth will therefore come from our wearables. With this, we will be able to monitor our patients even from afar, and patients too are accountable for their own health. A heart attack for instance does not happen overnight. It is a culmination of bad diet, a lack of exercise and poor lifestyle habits. Many of these factors are within a person’s control.”
Next month, iHeal will be introducing Medtech, its wearable devices whch is part of its push to proactively make people take care of their heart.
iHeal will be partnering with doctors in Malaysia for this venture.
How it works is that doctors will ask their heart patients to wear these wearables, where all the relevant data will be monitored and stored in a cloud. Patients will get to consult a heart specialist four times a year to analyse and assess the information from the cloud.
“It is our hope that we may be able to help you obtain and maintain your first wealth – your health,” says Khoo.