BANGALORE: What if hospitals were run like a mix of Wal-Mart and a low-cost airline? The result might be something like the chain of “no-frills” Narayana Hrudayalaya clinics in southern India.
Using pre-fabricated buildings, stripping out air-conditioning and even training visitors to help with post-operative care, the group believes it can cut the cost of heart surgery to an astonishing $800.
“Today healthcare has got phenomenal services to offer. Almost every disease can be cured and if you can’t cure patients, you can give them meaningful life,” says company founder Dr Devi Shetty, one of the world’s most famous heart surgeons.
“But what percentage of the people of this planet can afford it? A hundred years after the first heart surgery, less than 10 percent of the world’s population can,” he said.
Already famous for his “heart factory” in Bangalore, which does the highest number of cardiac operations in the world, the latest Narayana Hrudayalaya (“Temple of the Heart”) projects are ultra low-cost facilities.
The first is a single-storey hospital in Mysore, two hours drive from Bangalore, which was built for about $7.4m in only 10 months and recently opened its doors.
Set amid palm trees and with five operating theatres for cardiac, brain and kidney procedures, Shetty boasts how it was built at a fraction of the cost of equivalents in the rich world.
“Near Stanford (in the US), they are building a 200-300 bed hospital. They are likely to spend over $600m,” he said.
“There is a hospital coming up in London. They are likely to spend over a billion pounds,” added the father of four, who has a large print of mother Teresa on his wall — one of his most famous patients. Our target is to build and equip a hospital for $6m and build it in six months.”
The Mysore facility represents his vision for the future of healthcare in India — and a model likely to burnish India’s reputation as a centre for low-cost innovation in the developing world.
Relatives or friends visiting in-patients undergo a four-hour nursing course and are expected to change bandages and do other simple tasks.
AFP
