Affordable, High Quality Healthcare For All
Born from a burning desire to bring affordable, high quality healthcare to the masses, Narayana Health is a multi-discipline chain of hospitals that extends from its base in India now to the Cayman Islands. It has revolutionized the way healthcare is received for the people of India. It’s set to do the same for patients in the Western hemisphere with the advent of NH Cayman Islands, known as Health City Cayman Islands.
The Narayana Health (NH) model, pioneered by globally renowned heart surgeon, humanitarian and social entrepreneur, Dr. Devi Shetty, offers an affordable, globally-benchmarked quality-driven healthcare service model that is so desperately needed in today’s current climate of escalating health costs and rapidly increasing numbers of chronic conditions that the world faces.
In addition to the implementation of the latest technologies, such as using tablets in the ICU instead of patient charts, simulation technology to help train critical care nurses and telemedicine for those in remote parts of India, has helped to deliver a far higher quality of healthcare that’s helping to keep patients safer and create better recovery outcomes.
The Transformation of Healthcare Delivery
In 2001 Dr. Devi Shetty embarked on a plan to transform healthcare in India, a country where very few were able to pay for its cost. His 5,000-bed Narayana Health City Bangalore kick-started the process, offering patients not just from India, but all over the world, affordable quality healthcare, beginning with a cardiac care hospital and then expanding to include a cancer care hospital (the largest in India), a women’s and children’s hospital, along with nephrology, orthopedic and research and training centres. Between 10,000 and 12,000 outpatients are seen daily. The heart hospital has the infrastructure to perform 60 heart surgeries per day.
Further Health Cities were developed across India, including Narayana Health in Kolkata, Jamshedpur, Dharwad and Kolar; all in all 26 hospitals in 16 cities have been built over a 15year period. Dr. Shetty’s vision is to further develop 30,000 beds in the next seven years in newly built hospitals across India and the Cayman Islands.
This high volume approach is the secret to the success of Narayana Health.
Affordable Healthcare is the Solution
In many countries, however, healthcare is prohibitively expensive. For example, heart surgery is only affordable for less than 8 per cent of the world’s population. “For 92 per cent of people living on this planet, heart surgery is a distant dream,” Dr.Devi Prasad Shetty.
At Narayana Health, they believe that ‘quality’ and ‘affordability’ aren’t mutually exclusive when it comes to providing healthcare. In particular, the high volume of outpatients seen at Narayana Health hospitals helps to fund the unprecedented number of surgeries that are offered at a fraction of the cost of those offered in the Western hemisphere.
“If the solution isn’t affordable, it’s not a solution,” Dr.Devi Prasad Shetty.
