SMRT to be designed by HOSMAC
LUCKNOW : The Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur (IIT-K), has appointed HOSMAC, Asia’s leading healthcare management and planning consultancy, to design the School of Medical Research and Technology (SMRT), an official said.
SMRT, being developed at the IIT Kanpur campus, will be a full-fledged medical school comprising a centre of excellence (CoE) and a super-specialty teaching hospital.
Prof Abhay Karandikar, director, IIT Kanpur said, “IIT Kanpur’s vision to merge medicine and engineering will be achieved with the School of Research and Medical Technology. This new initiative will bring about a sea change in innovative research that addresses medical problems through a robust R&D focus to develop need driven medical devices and technologies.”
Combining medicine with engineering and encouraging cross-disciplinary learning, SMRT will provide an ecosystem that promotes the development of technology-based interventions for diagnosis, surveillance, management, mitigation, and prevention of diseases, he said.
The director said, “The proposed hospital with a medical college will have a built-up area of more than 1 million square feet. It will be India’s first-of-akind super-specialty teaching hospital with a medical college.”
The building forms, facade articulation, open spaces, vegetation strategy, water bodies and road networks, which have been designed to weave and merge into the 1000 acres master plan of IIT Kanpur, conceptualized by the late Architect Padma Shri Achyut Kanvinde.
SMRT will complete the MedTech ecosystem at IIT Kanpur with a medical programme on campus that includes a complete clinical set up.
HOSMAC was initially appointed by Tata Trusts to prepare a detailed business plan for IIT Kanpur to assess the feasibility of starting a medical school within its campus. HOSMAC is now appointed for preparing the master plan and to undertake detailed architecture and engineering design of the campus.
“The primary aim is to innovate and develop medical technology that can be adapted to local needs of Indian patients. Since India is a net importer of med-tech (of almost 80 percent), the initiative will help make the country self-reliant (Atmanirbhar) and overcome dependency on imports,” said Dr Vivek Desai, founder and managing director of HOSMAC.
“The introduction of the medical division will provide added impetus to the existing biomedical engineering department at IIT Kanpur,” said Dr. Ganesh, Deputy Director, IIT Kanpur.
In the first phase of the project, the institute will offer post-graduate courses such as cardiology and cardiothoracic surgery, urology and nephrology, medical and surgical gastroenterology, neurology and neurosurgery and oncology. It will be open for MBBS admissions in phase II of the project.