Narayana Health focuses at tech to make healthcare affordable: Here's what Dr Devi Shetty has to say

The Bengaluru-headquartered chain, founded by noted cardiac surgeon Dr Devi Shetty in 2000, has a razor-sharp focus on making healthcare affordable through the use of technology and removing inefficiencies in the system.

Stressing that the multispeciality healthcare provider cannot reduce manpower costs because it doesn't want to compromise on the quality of clinicians or nurses, he said, "The only lever left for us to drive further cost reduction is process improvement and role automation, and this can only be achieved by adopting digital technology." When a hospital moves its data to cloud, it unlocks treatment protocols that were previously unimaginable, helping patients access the best of medical advice and treatment from doctors in different parts of the country Shetty explained. AWS, he added, offers a comprehensive portfolio of tools in managing big data and advanced analytics that is well equipped to cater to large scale health systems.

Excerpts from the interview:

Q: How is technology transforming and redefining the healthcare industry? Which are the areas tech is being heavily leveraged within the industry?

A: Technology is being extensively utilised across the entire breadth of the healthcare industry to track consumption, improve process efficiency, measure performance, record clinical data, automate repetitive functions, coordinate between multiple departments, and track quality indicators. We are, to paraphrase Jeff Bezos, still in Day 1 of the technology transformation of the healthcare industry. Most hospitals are in the early days of digitising their financial and medical data. They are investing in hospital information systems, enterprise resource planning systems, and patient engagement tools.

Hospitals like ours have invested considerable resources in these systems and we are driving their adoption across a large spectrum of users. The areas where technology is heavily utilised are finance and medical records because manual systems are too slow and incapable of handling large volumes of data.

Q: What is your vision for the technology transformation journey of Narayana Health?

A: Our vision is to make healthcare affordable to everyone. From the beginning, we have tried to remove inefficiencies in our system to lower our costs. The biggest drivers of hospital expenses are material, manpower, and overheads. We were able to control supply chain expenses in the early days, but if we lower drug prices any further, it will impact the clinical quality.

We were able to increase the utilisation of our equipment and our operating theatres, until we reached their physical limits. We can't reduce manpower costs because we don't want to compromise on the quality of our clinicians or nurses. The only lever left for us to drive further cost reduction is process improvement and role automation, and this can only be achieved by adopting digital technology.

Q: What new innovations can be expected in the field of medical science, healthcare and pharma?

A: As more and more clinical data moves into the cloud, we are seeing the rapid transformation of the field of clinical research. Most clinical research involves long and expensive multi-centre trials across many phases, but it is much cheaper for data scientists to mine large volumes of past electronic medical data to conduct virtual trials.

During the Covid pandemic, our organisation collaborated with a large number of hospitals from around the world to share treatment protocols, so that we could all observe in real-time how certain drug combinations worked on different kinds of patients. This was driven by dire necessity, but it gives us the model for how multi-centre trials can be conducted across a worldwide network of hospitals at a much lower cost.

Q: What are your specific goals for Narayana Health for the next three-four years? Will technology and digital be a big component of your plans?

A: Our patients demand the highest standards of service in the best infrastructure, want to be treated by the best doctors using the best equipment, and want to pay the least for these services. The only way to achieve the impossible trinity of service, quality and cost is to throw all orthodoxies out the window and embrace digitisation across every department of our hospitals. We have a large team of engineers building applications for our patients, implementing a cloud-based hospital information system for our managers, and developing best-in-class analytics for our doctors.

Our patients can book an appointment on our app, speak to a doctor on their phone, and pay for their entire OPD visit online. Our doctors can conduct virtual rounds of patients in the ICU and pull up the latest lab reports on their phone. Our managers can track the daily footfalls of every single department in their hospital and identify bottlenecks during peak hours. This has allowed us to increase the throughput in the same infrastructure, while improving the clinical quality indicators.

Q: What are the expansion and investment plans of Narayana Health over the next three-four years?

A: Our expansion plans are almost entirely focused on expanding the capacity and capabilities of our existing hospitals. We will be adding beds and services in Bangalore and Kolkata and expanding services in the rest of the hospitals. Our biggest opportunities for growth are in our digital and retail infrastructure. We have started rolling out a comprehensive patient engagement platform that will allow us to follow our patients throughout their care journey.

Our data intelligence team is building a new platform called Medha that will allow anyone working in the hospital to pull up data and insights from any department, which will streamline our decision-making. On the retail side, we are setting up clinics to offer primary care services closer to where our patients live.

Q: How has cloud technology and AWS enabled you to do better? What are the key business benefits Narayana Health has derived from this association?

A: AWS offers a comprehensive portfolio of tools in managing big data and advanced analytics that is well equipped to cater to large scale health systems such as Narayana Health capturing near petabyte scale data. The analytics division at Narayana Health actively keeps track of developments in the AWS tech stack in its effort to maintain a state-of-the-art data intelligence ecosystem.

The most expensive medical treatment for the patient is the cost of an unnecessary procedure. When doctors have the right data accessible to them at the right time, they can make better treatment decisions that are safer for the patient. When a hospital moves their data to cloud, it unlocks treatment protocols that were previously unimaginable.

Today, a team of doctors sitting in different parts of the country can simultaneously access the medical information of a critically ill patient and treat them without having to be physically present at the bedside. The success of these tools depends on the reliability of the cloud provider and large hospital networks would only trust top tier cloud providers like AWS to offer guarantees of 24/7 performance.