By Saritha Rai, From Forbes

Cardiac surgeon Dr. Devi Shetty of Bangalore-based Narayana Health, known for his pioneering low-cost healthcare innovations, has launched a 104-bed hospital this week in America’s backyard in Cayman Islands in the Caribbean. It is an hour’s flight from Miami – and just far enough not to be curbed by the country’s regulations.

There, Shetty wants to showcase learnings from his 23 hospital-14 city-6,300 bed Indian hospital chain and make it a How-not-to example for what he calls an ‘absurdly expensive’ American healthcare system.

The best location on the planet for a hospital is a ship anchored just off the U.S. waters, and the Cayman Islands site is the closest approximation to that, Dr. Shetty told the Economic Times. The regulatory restrictions in the United States are so stifling that healthcare innovations are difficult, the doctor is quoted as saying.

The hospital is envisaged as a $2 billion, 2,000-bed Health City in about 10 years, much larger in scale than the one Shetty runs in the suburbs of Bangalore. It is to eventually contain a medical university and an assisted living facility. To start with, however, the hospital will have Indian doctors and provide cardiac and orthopedic treatments at a third of the costs of hospitals in the United States. Bigger price cuts are expected in the future.

In India, Shetty has worked to drive down heart surgery costs – aiming to reach $1,000 per surgery – by bringing in economies of scale and talking the likes of GE into running dedicated equipment on per-use basis in his hospitals instead of purchasing outright. He wants to adopt some of these practices in multiple locations in the Caribbean to demonstrate that the high-quality, low-cost model can work in the West and thereby pressure American healthcare providers to innovate.

Narayana Health has made cardiac surgeries precise, process-driven tasks, thus weeding out time and manpower inefficiencies. At its heart hospital in Bangalore, for instance, the operation theaters work six days a week and are packed from dawn to dusk. The surgical wards resemble a production line with streamlined processes. The staff readies the patient for the surgery, junior surgeons open up the chest while senior surgeons conduct only the crucial portions of the procedure. This has helped the chain execute a record number of heart surgeries with impressive surgical turnaround times and high success rates.

PHOTO: Dr. Devi Shetty at his Narayana Hospital in Bangalore ( Image © Namas Bhojani)

For more on this story go to:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/saritharai/2014/02/25/indian-surgeon-known-for-walmart-izing-heart-surgery-brings-affordable-healthcare-closer-to-americans/

See also iNews Cayman story published February 25 2014 “Health City Cayman Islands opens doors” at: http://www.ieyenews.com/wordpress/health-city-cayman-islands-opens-doors/

And

iNews Cayman story published February 24 2014 “A new approach to delivering healthcare” at: http://www.ieyenews.com/wordpress/a-new-approach-to-delivering-healthcare/