New kid on healthcare block

HEALTHCARE: Columbia Asia benchmarks quality and cost.

Two hospitals in Bangalore, the two-year-old Columbia Asia and the 18-year-old Manipal, recently simultaneously joined the elite group (there are now 12 in all) which have been accredited by the National Accreditation Board for Hospitals.

This badge of quality at an early age (only one other hospital, of the Fortis group, won the accreditation when it was slightly younger) is one of the attributes that makes Columbia Asia a little different and possibly a symbol of the change taking place in Indian private healthcare.

The hospital group, promoted by a group of NRI investors based in the US, is headquartered in Malaysia and has footprints there and in Vietnam. It has "extremely ambitious expansion plans," according to Nandakumar Jairam, chairman and medical director of the Indian operations.

The sole India operation, an 80-bed hospital in Bangalore, broke even on its 16th month of operation and three new group hospitals are coming up in Bangalore, Kolkata and Gurgaon (Palam Vihar) which will take the total number of beds to 500 by the end of the year.

India will then account for half of the group's total number of beds. Further down the line, the group is examining expansion plans in Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

Jairam, who spent many years at St John's in Bangalore and was earlier associated with Mayo Clinic in the US, is a former chairman of CII's Institute of Quality. "Quality and ethics are vital to me at a personal level," he says.

The third leg of Columbia Asia's business model is cost, with its rates being "just above that of the cheapest corporate hospital in Bangalore."

Jairam feels that major changes are taking place in private healthcare in India today. He says, "Governance is coming in as hospitals are becoming accountable to patients and players in the industry like insurance companies and financial institutions. In the future, unless you can live up to the standards, you will not survive."

The hospital seeks to assure high standards of medical and nursing care through training and a three-tier system of audit "" based on patient feedback, internal scrutiny and group follow-up.

Columbia Asia is particularly proud of its information system, which it considers "the most advanced" in the country. It is proprietary, has been developed by the group in-house and is regularly updated. This allows it to maintain patient data 100 per cent electronically and the data can be provided to patients within minutes.

To maintain standards, the hospital follows a dual procedure of "credentialing and privileging" to select specialists. What this means is that a doctor is not selected simply on the basis of his degrees but also with reference to the specific procedures which he specialises in.

It is also resorting to innovation to tackle one of the biggest criticisms levelled against private healthcare "" patients having to pay excessively because of "superfluous tests". It is devising an "integrated critical care pathway, a specific flow of events which needs to be followed by every physician for the treatment of a given symptom."

If a doctor deviates from this standard for whatever reason, he has to document the reason for doing so. Columbia Asia feels confident about growing rapidly in India as, explains CEO Tufan Ghosh, it has been able to "standardise protocols and processes so that they can be set in motion through sort of plug and play."