Tag

What does the nephew of the 41st American President and the cousin of the 43rd have in common with an Indian doctor?

They're both passionate about using new technologies to provide high quality healthcare at affordable cost.

Bush and Shetty
Jonathan Bush, a relative of two former American Presidents, is the co-author of Where Does it Hurt? which calls for a healthcare revolution to give patients more choices, and affordable quality care.

A former Army medic and ambulance driver, Bush is the cofounder and CEO of athenahealth, one of the fastest growing American cloud-based service companies, which handles electronic medical records, billing, and patient communications for more than 50,000 US health providers.

Dr Devi Shetty is a brilliant heart surgeon, and veteran of more than 30,000 operations. However, his growing international reputation rests less on his medical skill, and more on his business brain. He wants to do for healthcare what Henry Ford did for the motorcar: "make quality healthcare affordable."

Shetty is the founder and chairman of Narayana Health, and by thinking differently to traditional healthcare providers, he's built, India's largest private hospital group comprised of 23 hospitals in 14 Indian cities.

 

Shetty practices what Bush preaches
Bush suggests that the only way America will provide convenient quality healthcare at affordable cost, is if doctors do what they're trained to do, others perform routine services for less: for example, nurse-intensivists relieve surgeons from ICUs, and most importantly, if healthcare entrepreneurs are encouraged to tap into the transformative power of the marketplace.

For the past 15 years Shetty has been practicing what Bush is now preaching.  Narayana Health provides high quality healthcare, with compassion at affordable cost on a large scale. For instance in 2013, its 1,000-bed specialist heart hospital in Bangalore alone, performed a staggering 6,000 operations, half of them on children. By contrast, in the same year, Great Ormond Street Hospital in London performed less than 600.

In addition to hospitals, Shetty has developed a telemedicine practice, which reaches 100 facilities throughout India and more than 50 in Africa. Narayana Health is also India’s largest kidney-care provider. Shetty has started a micro-insurance program backed by the government that enables three million farmers to have health coverage for as little as US$2 in annual premiums. Over the next five years, Shetty plans to grow Narayana Health four times its present size and become a 30,000-bed hospital chain.
 
Healthcare change will come from developing nations
Bush says, the only way to build a flourishing health marketplace that everyone wants and can afford is for Americans to demand more from their health providers, and accept greater responsibility for their own health.

This will not happen, and Shetty explains why.

Shetty argues that the greatest advances in healthcare will not come from wealthy nations like the US and UK, but from developing nations. Rapidly changing technologies provide opportunities for developing nations to leapfrog wealthy nations, which are encumbered by entrenched and aging technologies.
 
Hospitals in developing countries with few advanced procedures can quickly leapfrog world-class hospitals such as those in the US and the UK, says Shetty. Instead of slowly replacing aging technologies, they can quickly implement innovative operational designs, and state-of-the-art technologies, which gives them a competitive advantage.  
 
Narayana Health City Cayman
This is what Shetty has done in the Cayman Islands. Backed by Ascension, the largest private health network in the US, and the Cayman government, which has designated a 200-acre site for the development of Narayana Health City Cayman.
 
 The first phase, which opened in February 2014, is a 104-bed tertiary hospital, which provides surgeries for less than half the average US price, with quality outcomes that match or exceed the very best US hospitals.  Narayana Health City Cayman is expected to develop into a 2000-5000-bed conglomeration of JCI accredited multiple super speciality hospitals in a single campus providing affordable healthcare to thousands.
 
Takeaway
Americans will have access to high quality healthcare at affordable cost, but it won’t happen in the way that Bush anticipates. Grand Cayman is only a 30minute flight from Miami.