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Devi Shetty’s model for affordable healthcare
On the 26th March 2019 Bloomberg Businessweek published an article entitled, "The World’s Cheapest Hospital has to Get Even Cheaper”, which describes one of India’s largest private hospital chain's - Narayana Health - response to Modicare, a signature initiative by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to provide basic healthcare for 500m of India’s poorest.
Devi Shetty, a world-renowned cardiac surgeon and chairman of Narayana Health, is up for the task. Since Shetty founded Narayana in 2000 it has grown to become a large multi-speciality hospital chain, comprising 31 state-of-the-art tertiary hospitals across 19 cities, employing 16,000 and each year treating over 2.5m patients across more than 30 medical specialities. Shetty’s mission is to provide high quality, affordable healthcare services to the broader population in India and he is convinced that quality and low-cost healthcare are not mutually exclusive. In conjunction with the state of Karnataka, Shetty has created a health insurance plan, which has enrolled some 3m poor people at an annual premium of about US$2.6. More than half of Narayana’s cardiac operations are performed on patients too poor to afford the full cost. In addition to the insurance scheme free or subsidized inpatient care is achieved through philanthropy and a cross-subsidy model, in which higher-income patients pay more for nonclinical amenities, such as private recovery rooms. Since the total charges are still far below the cost of comparable services at other private Indian hospitals, Narayana Health remains an attractive option for such consumers. Narayana Health’s business model is sustainable because of its ability to attract so many patients who can pay full price. The Wall Street Journal has dubbed Shetty, The Henry Ford of Heart Surgery because he applies assembly line concepts to surgery in order to optimize productivity, minimize costs and leverage economies of scale. Because of these innovations the average cost of open-heart surgery, as reported by Narayana Health, is less than US$2,000. The same procedure at a US research hospital typically costs more than US$100,000.
Since 2012 HealthPad has worked closely with Devi Shetty. We published our first Commentary about Narayana Health and Devi Shetty’s model for affordable quality healthcare in 2013 and in subsequent years published two more. Shetty and his fellow senior surgeons have contributed over 700 videos to HealthPad’s content library, which address FAQs across 11 clinical pathways. Further, Narayana’s clinicians have featured in HealthPad Commentaries on Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), Diabetes and Kidney Disease and Cardiovascular Disease. Because of the large and growing international interest in Shetty’s alternative model for affordable healthcare we re-publish lightly edited versions of HealthPad’s three Commentaries about Narayana Health.
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