How IHH Healthcare CEO Prem Kumar Nair is planning for a longer-lived Asia

Prem Kumar Nair thinks Asia’s ageing boom is forcing a rethink in healthcare, and he’s making that case from the top of IHH Healthcare, the region’s biggest private health group. His pitch is simple enough: people are living longer, getting richer, and paying more for the food and drinks that help push up diabetes, hypertension and high cholesterol. Longer life is not the same thing as a healthier one.

That’s the logic behind Healthspan, IHH’s preventive health and longevity program, which launched in July. It is only in Singapore for now, but Prem wants it in the group’s other nine markets later, including India, Turkey and Greater China. The emphasis is clinical, not cosmetic. Older patients are steered toward resistance training to prevent falls and fractures, and GLP-1 drugs are used to fight obesity-linked arthritis and metabolic disease rather than chase aesthetic weight loss.

The company is also moving closer to where older patients live. In dense cities such as Singapore and Hong Kong, IHH is building more ambulatory care centers that can handle procedures like endoscopies and total knee replacements without a hospital stay. Its Parkway MediCentre in Singapore’s Woodleigh district mixes chronic disease management with specialist consultations, which is a neat little sign of where this whole business is heading: less fortress hospital, more neighborhood service.

Prem’s own shift at IHH has been just as telling. After joining in 2020, following 27 years at Raffles Medical Group, he pushed the company away from buying growth and toward growing inside the markets it already knows. Since then, IHH says it has added 4,000 beds. The group now has 89 hospitals in 10 countries and 2025 revenue of about $6 billion, and its shares are up more than 20% over the past 12 months.

The bigger bet, though, is that healthcare is becoming more specialized and more data-heavy. Prem says cancer is overtaking cardiology as the main subspecialty, so IHH is putting money into cancer testing, genomic medicine and precision medicine. It backed Lucence in a $20 million Series A in 2019, and it is also leaning into AI with NurseShift.ai and new clinical-pathway tools that help doctors standardize care without pretending every patient is identical. That’s a much more interesting longevity story than another jar of vitamins.