Priyanka Joshi meets infertility specialist Dr Aniruddha Malpani and finds that he has some innovative ideas about his profession.
He is a doctor who is also an avid blogger. Now, you may not really expect this from someone in as time-consuming a profession as medicine, an expert who has reached the very top of his field, but Mumbai-based
Dr Aniruddha Malpani is quite tech savvy and has, in fact, quite successfully harnessed the benefits of the Internet for his own medical work. This doc not only has a website, but he says he spends at least two-three hours every day answering emails and updating his blog. Besides this, he also finds time to run a patient education library. But first, for those of you who may not really know him, meet the doc:
Dr Malpani is one of the most reputed In Vitro Fertilisation (IVF) specialists in India with a burgeoning list of patients and heaps of goodwill. And it is not just in his clinic that you can seek a consultation. He answers each and every query on his blog, doctorandpatient.blogspot.com.
A soft-spoken individual, Dr Malpani does not like to boast about his patients and his success. “I have been lucky,” he smiles. It’s been a long road for this second generation doctor who began his career determined to focus on the taboo subject of infertility. According to Dr Malpani, infertile couples are not only socially isolated but are particularly emotionally vulnerable. This is one reason why he insists on spending time answering every single one of his patients’ queries, either online or in person, instead of employing an army of staff to rush the queues.
Spending his early years in the US, where he perfected his knowledge, the doctor returned home to face the truth — the Indian healthcare market was shambolic and ruled according to doctors’ whims. He chose to stay out of the rat race. Dr Malpani is probably one the few from his ilk who does not earn a single penny from what is commonly known as “patient referrals.”
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This is a practice, common among general practitioners, when they refer patients to specialist doctors and earn commissions of up to 40 per cent. “I am proud to say that till date I have not earned or paid any doctor a single rupee as commission for patient referral. Every single patient of mine has either come through word of mouth or after reading my website,” he says with a tinge of pride. “A decade ago”, he recalls, “when my wife,
Dr Anjali Malpani, and I opened the first sperm bank in Mumbai, we managed to raise quite a stir.” The couple persisted, and eventually went on to become the most respected IVF specialists in the country with a steady number of international patients flocking to their clinic too.
Today, the Malpani Infertility Clinic restricts itself to just 400 IVF cycles instead of ploughing green from 600, which other IVF clinics manage in a month. Statistically speaking, over 1,500 babies have been born till date as a result of Malpani’s treatment.
But the doctor is clearly a creative soul too — and an enterprising one. Not only does he plan to write books on his subject of specialisation but is indeed thinking of launching a comic book to talk about issues around fertility that don’t get discussed in Indian households otherwise.
The enterprising doctor is also now charting his course to launch nation-wide infertility clinics in collaboration with a larger hospital chain. This is slated to come about by next year. “This is an effort to take our IVF facilities to people across country. This wouldn’t be a means to earn more money since these clinics would be run by a nationalised hospital chain,” he insists. Dr Malpani and his wife have recently developed a simple and inexpensive conception technique that could help infertile couples.
“Since we can’t be in every part of the country, the idea is to take this treatment across the country and help the growing number of infertile couples.” The Malpanis have designed and developed “hot block”, an intra-vaginal culture technique that can bring down costs. Under the method, the female egg and male sperms are fertilised in a vial costing Rs 2, instead of a sophisticated incubator that costs Rs 5-7 lakh.
The 47-year-old’s latest passion is his patient education library, an initiative funded by Dr Malpani himself, that began in 1997. This library, explains Dr Malpani, houses 600 videotapes, over 5,000 consumer health books and articles collected from across the globe. “This is a free library to help patients understand their condition and educate themselves before they approach any doctor.” This one is certainly a full-of-ideas doc.