Bangalore: Narayana Hrudayalaya, the city-based heart hospital, will begin touching more hearts in Pakistan, when it connects to a diagnostic centre in Karachi through a telemedicine link in a month.

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Narayana Hrudayalaya Chairman Dr Devi Shetty told reporters today (May 8, 2004) that a few doctors in Karachi have come together to set up the diagnostic centre and they would be provided consultation by experts through an ISDN link from Bangalore.

"We will begin telemedicine links to Karachi in a month," Shetty said.

The hospital was in the limelight when it conducted a heart surgery on Noor Fatima, the two-and-half-year-old child from Pakistan, who came to India on the first Dosti bus, after resumption of bus service between the two neighbours in July 2003. It generated a groundswell of goodwill between the people of the two nations.

The hospital has 22 telemedicine centres in India and abroad including in Malaysia and Maldives.

Narayana Hrudayalaya, Shetty said, receives 30 per cent of its patients from foreign countries, largely from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, but after Noor's treatment, the hospital has seen a steady flow of Pakistani patients.

He said about 40 per cent of the operations in the hospital are conducted on children below the age of 12.

The hospital, he said, conducts 22 heart surgeries every day and performed over 9,000 operations in three years.