Kolkata’s ascent: A healthcare hub in the making for East, North-East India, and beyond

He is a seasoned professional with 33 years’ experience with some of the marquee companies in India like Johnson & Johnson, Thermax, Kansai Nerolac Paints, Mahindra Life Spaces, and Apollo Hospitals. His 13 year long stint with Apollo Hospitals, managing different verticals of healthcare formats like Hospitals, Apollo Clinics and Boutique Birthing Centre ( Cradle), helped him develop a deep domain expertise in hospital turnaround, accreditation, operations and P&L. Additionally, he developed proficiency in market and business intelligence, customer evaluations, improvement programmes and establishing best industry practices.

While speaking to Bizz Buzz exclusively, Ravindra Pai, the new Deputy Managing Director of Peerless Hospital & BK Roy Research Centre, explains how he wants to create and maintain a framework where healthcare professionals can practice their skills in the right spirit with empathy, pride and passion, while ensuring that its infrastructure remain cutting edge

The key challenge for any helmsman in the healthcare sector in this part of the country is to reverse the trend of patient outflow to South India. That’s what many people think. Given your vast experience of managing similar positions in South India, what is your take on this and do you think this trend can be reversed? What needs to be done for that?

To answer this, we must first look at why did the outflow of patients start? What were the root causes? In mid 90s (around 1995), patients from this part of the country were seen going to southern Indian states, particularly to Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad for treatments. Healthcare infrastructure in Kolkata or in the East was nothing to write home about. Around the same time, all large corporate hospitals started coming up in those southern cities. Availability of good doctors was not sufficient in Kolkata either, thanks to lack of infrastructure. There were large under-served patients. Patients who were well aware and were ready to go to a new place for treatment, chose to go to south Indian cities to avail of the advanced medical and healthcare facilities.

Then, the IT boom of 1993-94 saw all IT biggies and several other IT companies setting up shops in those cities, making them the IT hubs. These IT companies not only covered their employees’ medical expenses but also that of their parents. That was the other reason, many patients started opting for the hospitals in the Southern Indian cities.

However, in the recent past, the local government has been taking several positive and pro-active steps to create the right kind of healthcare infrastructure here so as to stop outgo of large number of patients from the state. Besides, all top IT companies have set up their centres here and as a result quite a large number of young talents have come back and now prefer to stay back in their home state. Many people from outside the state are also having to settle here, thanks to setting up of centres by their oranisations. Mind you that the healthcare industry is more or less demand-driven. The sector grows following demand. Therefore, it does not require any rocket science to understand why the state’s healthcare infrastructure is improving significantly.

Do you think that East can emerge as the healthcare hub of India? What would be the key challenges in this case?

I don’t thing Kolkata or the East would emerge as the healthcare hub in the country, anytime soon. However, I have a strong feeling that Kolkata will come up as the healthcare hub of the East, North-East, and even Bangladesh and Myanmar. Out of 1100 OPD patients that visit us everyday, 150 patients, on an average, are from Bangladesh. That’s a big number. A large number of patients also come from Myanmar and seven sisters of the North East, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand. Availability of quality doctors originating out of the state, has never been a problem, retaining them here, was. With world class medical infrastructure coming up here, they would certainly prefer staying back in their home state. So I find no reason why Kolkata would not emerge as the Healthcare Hub of this large region.

Do you see any consolidation taking place in the healthcare (hospitals) sector in eastern India or in India, as a whole?

Certainly, yes! I would say consolidation, or 70 per cent of the consolidation has already taken place and the process is still on. Such consolidation and inorganic growth make lot of sense. Consolidation along with inorganic growth helps bigger players in expanding its geographical reach quickly. It helps smaller and mid-sized players in improving the quality of service and infrastructure and upgrading themselves. And it helps patients immensely, letting them avail of quality medical infrastructure, facilities and other services closer to where they stay. And therefore it’s Win-Win for all.

When it comes to Peerless Hospital, you must have some expansion plans at the back of your mind?

Yes, of course. We are at present a 400-bed multi-speciality hospital and we are in the process of becoming the 500-bed hospital soon. The next stage would be to become a 750-bed hospital at our existing location. Our target is to become a 1000-bed hospital through inorganic growth. We have commissioned Deloitte to do inorganic evaluations and draw up and inorganic growth plans, which will be executed over the next 2-3 years. However, we will continue to focus and concentrate on the eastern Indian market and will remain an Eastern India hospital chain.

While we will continue to be a multi-speciality hospital, we are in the process of strengthening our Oncology department significantly, adding most modern and advanced facilities, amenities, infrastructure at our existing location.

Although, it is still on the drawing board stage, we are picking up brains and mulling to foray into ‘elderly care’ segment, innovatively. We are looking at areas like chronic disease management, elderly living, mental health centres, transitional centres and so on. If things move the way, it has been envisaged, we will get to see many of these new facilities and mechanisms getting off the ground by the next fiscal.

With your vast experience of the health industry in the rest of the country, how do you rate the efficiency levels of medical and non-medical health professionals of Kolkata? What are the lacuna which needs to be overcome?

I think medical practitioners, para medical and other support staff in this part of the country are as good as their counterparts elsewhere in the country. Yes, there were some shortcomings with regard to infrastructure and technology adoption. But those are gone now. What is needed is a strong political will and a proactively supportive local government so as to ensure that the private players in the healthcare and hospital space prosper.

How do you plan to manage the patient-hospital (read doctors) relationships? Are you planning any measures to brush up communication and relationship management skills of your professionals?

Again, we need to go two steps behind, in order to find out if there were problems in this regard, why they were there. Doctors were (and sometimes, are) often over burdened with the number of patients and at times with lots of administrative jobs. Ever since we identified these as pain points, we have been in the process of improving the doctor-patient ratio and more importantly, de-cluttering pure medial and administrative responsibilities. We have allowed busy doctors to shrug off their administrative duties so that they can concentrate more on their core areas, which is pure medical practices.

We have also started several soft skill training programmes for this purpose, where senior doctors and other senior staff go and take classes. Going forward also, there will be several such initiatives to improve in these areas.

You must appreciate that private hospitals are also corporate entities and they also need well structured, well planned brand building strategies and exercises. Do you have anything of that sort?

Yes, absolutely. We will take up a number of brand building exercises once our new advanced facilities in the Oncology get off the ground. These will be weaved around these new facilities. Mind you that Peerless as a group, has been a very strong brand in eastern India and Bangladesh. Given the fact that the owners are from Bangladesh and they had originally started their operations there, people in Bangladesh have a strong emotional connect with the brand. We will leverage that and build up Peerless Hospital’s brand on that. We will build it as the best and most trust-worthy hospital brand in Eastern India. Peerless Hospital will be promoted as a brand that is able to adapt to dynamic changes in healthcare delivery, not only in curing illnesses but also in preserving health. It will be a brand that stands for serving patients that makes them happy, giving service that makes them smile.