Former TCS boss, Devi Shetty team up

A stitch in time saves nine. An the number could be more when the Henry Ford of Indian healthcare teams up with one of India’s savviest CEOs who simply refuses to hang up his boots.

Cardiac surgeon, Devi Shetty, the messiah of low cost surgeries, and S Ramadorai, the former boss of TCS, are planning to build a 1,000-bedded super specialty hospital dedicated to pediatrics in downtown Mumbai. The Children Hospital, expected to be operational over the next 18 months, will cater to Indian patients as well as those from Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia who have limited or zero access to affordable high-quality healthcare facilities.

“The hospital will have one-stop pediatric facilities ranging from cardiac surgery, orthopedics, bone marrow, urology and physiotherapy among others. It will have an area of 1.8 lakh square feet. In the second phase, there will be an additional space of 100,000 square feet with a total of 500 beds. Once it is fully functional we will be able to treat 3,000 children a day,” says Shetty.

Ramadorai’s involvement with childcare is not recent. For the last nine years, he has been actively involved with the Society for Rehabilitation of Crippled Children (SRCC) and even had TCS sponsor a children’s hospital in Mumbai. And as the current president of SRCC, Ramadorai has now ventured into a much bigger project.

The financial details of the project are still under wraps. However, it will follow a similar template that Shetty’s Narayana Hrudayalaya has successfully replicated nationwide and now even overseas. Treatment for needy children will be subsidized, and part of the cost will be born by “premium” patients and will also be supported by grants from individuals and trusts.

“No child should go without treatment for want of money. I am confident that with the partnership of Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospitals, we will be able to create a benchmark in the healthcare industry. Even in Mumbai, there is a 43 per cent shortage of pediatric beds,” said Ramadorai.

Shetty, says Ramadorai, was always the most obvious choice for this kind of collaboration. As an entrepreneur, Shetty has democratised healthcare using scalability to offset costs. His hospitals not only perform the largest number of cardiac surgeries in the world, but also provide heart treatments at one-tenth the cost.

Shetty also pioneered the concept of 'health city', a 2000-5000 bedded conglomeration of multi-specialty hospitals on a single campus. The Narayana Hrudayalaya Health City in Bangalore is one of its best examples; and the efforts have now been globalised. Early this year, Shetty embarked on a project to set up a center of excellence in Cayman Islands to cater to patients from the US, Caribbean and other countries in the region.