CUSTOMER STORIES
Apollo Hospitals is the pioneer of private healthcare in India and one of Asia's largest integrated healthcare groups. The group operates approximately 10,000 beds across 70 hospitals, supported by more than 2,556 pharmacies, over 172 primary care and diagnostic clinics, and 148 telemedicine units spanning 13 countries. Since inception, Apollo has touched the lives of over 50 million patients from 121 countries, and its network includes advanced facilities such as South Asia's leading Proton Therapy Centre.
Radiology is central to Apollo's clinical operations. With a network of this scale, the group generates an enormous and continuously growing volume of imaging across CT, MRI, digital radiography, ultrasound, mammography, nuclear medicine and interventional modalities, all of which must be available to clinicians across the enterprise in real time.
The Challenge
Before consolidation, imaging at a group of this size faced the classic problems of a multi-hospital enterprise. Each hospital historically maintained its own imaging infrastructure, which meant duplicated servers and storage at every site, inconsistent radiology workflows from one unit to another, and patient imaging histories that were locked inside individual facilities. A patient moving between Apollo units, for example from a secondary-care hospital to a tertiary centre of excellence, could not be guaranteed that their prior imaging would follow them.
Apollo needed a single enterprise imaging platform that could eliminate site-level imaging silos and hardware, give every authorised clinician in the group access to every patient's images and reports, allow radiology reporting capacity to be pooled and load-balanced across the network, integrate bidirectionally with the group's HIS, EMR and LIS environments, and scale to millions of studies per year without degradation in viewer performance or uptime.
The Medsynapse Solution (Chennai Cluster)
Medsynaptic deployed Medsynapse as one of India's first private-cloud enterprise PACS implementations. Rather than replicating infrastructure at each hospital, the entire imaging estate was consolidated into a centrally hosted private cloud, with no local PACS server or long-term storage retained at any individual hospital. This was later changed to a Local PACS Instance + Central PACS model due to heavy load. Every imaging modality in the group, more than 150 connected devices across all 17 hospitals in the Chennai Cluster including the Proton Centre, sends studies to the central platform, where they are archived in the VNA and served back to clinicians on demand.
Clinical access is delivered through the Medsynapse zero-footprint web viewer, which requires no workstation installation and runs on standard hospital desktops, tablets deployed in wards, and mobile devices for clinicians on the move. Bidirectional integration with Apollo's HIS, EMR and LIS ensures that orders, demographics, results and reports flow automatically between systems, so radiology operates as a fully connected part of the patient record rather than a standalone department.
Reporting is organised around a central reporting room model. Radiologists across the group work from unified worklists rather than site-specific queues, supported by speech-to-text dictation and dictaphone-based workflows that accelerate report turnaround. This structure allows Apollo to pool more than 100 concurrent radiologists into a single virtual reporting operation that serves the entire hospital network, with subspecialty cases routed to the most appropriate reader regardless of where the study was acquired.
Similar clusters have since been created in different regions of India, extending the same model to cover all of Apollo Group's hospitals nationwide.
Deployment at a Glance
Benefits Realised
The consolidated platform gives Apollo seamless access to patient images and reports across the entire cluster. A clinician at any group hospital can retrieve a patient's complete longitudinal imaging record, including relevant priors acquired at other units, directly within their normal workflow. This has improved diagnostic confidence, reduced repeat imaging, and made cross-facility referrals and tumour-board style reviews substantially easier.
Centralising radiology reporting for all group hospitals has allowed Apollo to balance workload across its radiologist pool, maintain consistent reporting quality and turnaround standards network-wide, and keep smaller units fully covered without requiring on-site subspecialists at every location. The elimination of hospital-level PACS servers and storage has also simplified IT operations and reduced the total cost of ownership of the imaging estate.
Beyond internal efficiency, the platform has become a revenue engine. Using the same central reporting infrastructure, Apollo now offers teleradiology services to external entities, converting spare reporting capacity into a new line of business. The net result is better patient care, smoother workflows and a radiology operation that functions as a single enterprise service rather than seventy separate departments.
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