School of Medical Research and Technology (SMRT) at IIT Kanpur to be designed by HOSMAC
Mumbai: IIT Kanpur has appointed HOSMAC, Asia’s leading healthcare management and planning consultancyto design the School of Medical Research and Technology (SMRT). SMRT, situated in the IIT Kanpur campus, will be a full-fledged Medical School comprising of Centres of Excellence (CoE) and a first-of-a-kind Super-Specialty Teaching Hospital. 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.
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-a-kind Super-Specialty Teaching Hospital with a Medical College Campus. The building forms, facade articulation, open spaces, vegetation strategy, water bodies and road networks have been designed to weave and merge into the 1000 acres masterplan of IIT Kanpur, conceptualised by the late Architect Padma Shri Achyut Kanvinde.
In recent years, IIT Kanpur has become the number one ecosystem for innovation and incubation in the area of biomedical research and healthcare in the country, with collaborations with Medical colleges and Hospitals across the country. SMRT will complete the missing link of a clinical set up on campus and address the challenges posed by distance that affect the overall outcome. SMRT will complete the MedTech ecosystem at IIT Kanpur with a medical program 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.
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. The institute is envisaged to be a one-of-its-kind medical school that would offer EnMed (Engineering in Medicine) programs wherein medical graduates will also be trained in engineering disciplines and vice versa to successfully bridge the technology gap and offer solutions to medical needs that are unique to India. We are sure that this path breaking centre would be a pioneer in terms of the manpower it would train at the interface of engineering and medicine.”
“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-sufficient(Atmanirbhar) and overcome dependency on imports. This will reducecosts and make treatment cheaper; thereby making healthcare more affordable and accessible. To facilitate this vision, we have conceptualized the super-specialty hospital as a floor-wise medical specialization stack,having its own clinical space (like OPD, IPD and diagnostics) with academic research blocks,”said Dr. Vivek Desai, Founder & Managing Director of HOSMAC.
“The introduction of the medical division will provide added impetus to the existing biomedical engineering department at IIT Kanpur. This will further add value to the research capabilities in both medicine and engineering and theworkforce trained at the center will have the ability to revolutionize healthcare in India,” said Dr. Ganesh, Deputy Director, IIT Kanpur.
In the first phase of the project, the institute will offer post-graduate courses such as Cardiology & Cardiothoracic Surgery, Urology & Nephrology, Medical & Surgical Gastroenterology, Neurology & Neurosurgery and Oncology. The idea is to encourage innovation and research development in these fields specifically, and also address the dearth of super-specialists in the country. It will be open for MBBS admissions in phase II of the project.