The neighbourhood general physicians or the personal physicians are a vanishing tribe, especially in the new localities. The last 10-15 years has seen a change in the healthcare scene with healthcare moving from the clinic to the hospital model.
It’s the general physicians or the GPs as they are called, who are needed to help people cut their healthcare costs as hospitals often put a person through a battery of tests before proclaiming that the individual is healthy. The costs can be brought down 40 per cent if primary healthcare is given attention as in the Scandinavian countries where hyealthcare makes up 8 per cent of the GDP, while in the US it is 16 per cent where tertiary healthcare gets primacy.
It’s the opportunity to cut cost of healthcare delivery that a start-up NationWide Primary Healthcare Services Pvt Ltd has found too attractive to be missed.
NationWide, an initiative of some doctors who have returned after working with the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK for over 10 years. They aim to bring back the concept of the personal physician in the country.
Dr Santanu Chattopadhyay, founder and managing director of the company, speaking of the idea, said, “We want to bring back the best practices in primary healthcare to India and to provide world class primary healthcare solutions and health plans.” Nationwide aims to provide primary healthcare services, health management solutions and health plans to individuals, private groups and corporates in India.
“I thought we can do similar things in healthcare just as what happened in IT,” he added. With 70 per cent of the doctors of the company being GPs who are returning from abroad, the company is also giving the GPs to have a practice here and turn an unorganised group into an organised group.
The chain, which on Tuesday has three hubs, aims to have a hub and spoke model with hubs being company-owned and spokes being made of franchisees i.e. doctors practicing on their own. The spokes will be in tier II towns ultimately.
The model, the firm says, will allow patients to have 24ô7 access to doctors who practice as a group. Also, it plans to have electronic medical records and house calls in addition to a software that will give doctors a reminder to follow up on a patient.
It costs Nationwide Rs 25-30 lakh to set up a clinic, and it hopes to have 20 clinics in the next 16-18 months. In five years it aims to have 100 of them. Till now the firm has raised $1.2 million. It is in the process of raising Rs 20-30 crore from VCs.
“It’s a noble concept,” said Sandeep Sinha, Dy Director, Healthcare, South Asia &. Middle East, Frost & Sullivan, adding, “if perfected, it’s an ideal model to follow. We need to wait and watch,” he said.
The biggest challenge to the model would be that of kick-backs that is now part of the system especially in case of diagnostics, said another analyst. “There is no time for physicians on Tuesday. The doctors attached to hospitals need to see more and more patients to earn more in commission. This has destroyed the concept of the family physician,” lamented Dr Mohammed Hussain Naseem, founder and CEO of 2mpower, a Bangalore-based wellness centre that focusses on preventive healthcare. On the concept catching on, Dr Naseem said, primary healthcare works best when you have family healthcare. Hence, he believes you have to revamp the system that focuses so much on cure and banks on so many unnecessary tests.
The company has till now raised Rs 20 crore.
