Budget Hospital India


In this picture taken on February 7, 2013 hospital staff work at one of the post-operative pediatrics observation and care units of the Narayana Hrudayalaya cardiac-care hospital in Bangalore. A group of Indian doctors believe they can cut the cost of heart surgery to an astonishing 800 USD at their "no thrills" low-cost hospital.




"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 told AFP from his office in hi-tech hub Bangalore.



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 600 million dollars," 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 six million dollars 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.

Air-conditioning is restricted to operating theatres and intensive care units. Ventilation comes from large windows on the wards.

Budget Hospital India

Manjunath Kiran/AFP

Medical staff at the Narayana Hrudayalaya, cardiac-care hospital in Mysore, on February 20, 2013. A group of Indian doctors believe they can cut the cost of heart surgery to an astonishing 800 USD at their "no thrills" low-cost hospital.

Relatives or friends visiting in-patients undergo a four-hour nursing course and are expected to change bandages and do other simple tasks.

In its architecture, Shetty rejected the generic multi-storey model, which requires costly foundations and steel reinforcements as well as lifts and complex fire safety equipment.

Much of the building was pre-fabricated off site and then quickly assembled.


Each will owe its existence to Shetty's original success story, his pioneering cardiac hospital in Bangalore which opened in 2001.

About 30 heart surgeries are performed there daily, the highest in the world, at a break-even cost of 1,800 dollars. Most patients are charged more than this, but some of the poorest are treated for free.

Its success has made Shetty a wealthy man and earned him international renown. Al-Jazeera recently broadcast a six-part series on the hospital whose wards are packed with low-income farmers and labourers.

In the crammed waiting room, families from across South Asia wait for appointments with the boss who juggles them between stints in theatre.

"We saw him on TV recently and we could see his commitment to poor people and middle class people like us," said Ranjan Bhattacharya, a civil servant, who had brought his ill wife 2,000 kilometres (1,200 miles) by train from northeast India.





Public spending on health in India amounts to just four percent of GDP, less than Afghanistan, according to the World Health Organization.

A lack of private insurance and a public system that has "collapsed" according to the country's rural development minister means an estimated 70 percent of healthcare spending is borne by Indians out of their own pockets.

So is Shetty a sharp-witted businessman who has spotted a gap in the market or a philanthropist?

"We believe that charity is not scalable. If you give anything free of cost, it is a matter of time before you run out of money, and people are not asking for anything free," he said.

His first foreign venture is a hospital on the Cayman Islands, targeting locals who would normally travel to the US for expensive treatment, and he says he would love to expand into Africa.

From 6,000 beds now in 17 clinics, he aims to expand privately-run Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospitals to a group with 30,000 beds in the next five years.

"The current regulatory structures, the current policies and business strategies (for healthcare) that we have are wrong. If they were right, we should have reached 90 percent of the world's population," he said.
