India’s “Robin Hood” Hospital May Be a Model for Elsewhere

The description may be a turn-off to some, but be patient (excuse the pun).

This is a private effort that is successful now (hence its inclusion as a Positivity post), and because of its private nature, could be emulated in other areas without the dead hand of the state ruining things:

Entrepreneurial Hospital Pioneers New Model

In Bangalore, a state-of-the-art hospital staffed by Western-trained physicians treats anyone suffering from a heart ailment. It accepts patients regardless of caste, class, religion, and perhaps most surprisingly, their ability to pay for treatment. Yet it is solvent, and its founder would like to roll out a similar model beyond India—maybe even into Europe and the U.S.

What’s the secret?

According to HBS (Harvard Business School) professor Tarun Khanna, the success of the hospital, called Narayana Hrudayalaya, is due to the vision and tireless work of a compassionate surgeon, Dr. Devi Shetty, whose specialty is heart care for children. It’s also a story made of equal parts Robin Hood humanitarianism, entrepreneurship, and the Indian government’s newfound ability to allow entrepreneurs a free hand in trying to solve some of society’s most desperate problems, said Khanna.

Khanna, who is writing a case on Shetty that will be taught to HBS MBA’s in the fall, said in an recent presentation on campus, “Dr. Shetty and I are working together to try to figure out ways to institutionalize his hospital model and spread it. He would like to create similar hospitals specializing in, for example, urology, ophthalmology, gynecology, and so on. His ambition is breathtaking.”

“He has also started training doctors in Tanzania and Malaysia. His ambition is to cure the poor of the world for one dollar a day. He also thinks there is no reason this couldn’t work in the United States for the inner city poor.”

Shetty’s model is based on staffing doctors who are extremely well-trained and dedicated, yet are willing to take a 50 percent pay cut compared to what they would earn in the West.
Born and raised in India, Shetty went to medical school in Mangalore and trained in cardiac surgery at Guy’s Hospital, London. He returned to India in 1989 to co-found a state-of-the-art center in Calcutta, the B.M. Biria Heart Research Center, which soon added pediatric cardiac surgical facilities. It was India’s first hospital specializing in the treatment of heart disease. Mother Teresa later chose him as her own physician. Reflecting on his background, Shetty wrote on his Web site that he became a doctor because of the recurrent illnesses of his parents. As a child he lived in fear that he would lose his mother; his father, a diabetic, suffered several diabetic comas.

As an adult back in India, Shetty was greatly inspired by his contact with Mother Teresa. He wrote, “One day, Mother Teresa, who at that point of time was convalescing in the intensive care unit of the hospital, saw me examining a ‘blue baby.’ After a few minutes of thought, she turned towards me and said, ‘Now I know why you are here. To relieve the agony of children with heart disease. God sent you to this world to fix it.’ To my mind, this is the best definition ever given of a pediatric cardiac surgeon and perhaps the best compliment that I have ever received.”

Said Khanna, “When Mother Teresa died, he decided to start Narayana Hrudayalaya. It’s kind of a Robin Hood hospital. When you walk in with a heart ailment, if you can pay, you pay; if you can’t pay, you get treated for free. It doesn’t matter what your heart ailment is. Its operating metrics are better than all the heart hospitals in the U.S. But what’s more interesting—and this is a function of operating in an environment such as India where heart disease is endemic—it’s a genetic trait among Indians, and also there are so many people, so there are more heart ailments—is that Dr. Shetty has one of the biggest, if not the biggest, pediatric heart hospital facilities in the world.”

Shetty also directs telemedicine units that connect to remote areas in northeastern India, allowing physicians and technicians to communicate on acute care.

The last paragraph of the excerpt made me think of what Porkopolis blogged on Sunday about mobile robotic surgery, and how that idea could be integrated into what Dr. Shetty has inspired. What a combo that would be.