With well over a hundred invited guests the well publicised Cayman Islands ‘Shetty’ hospital/health city finally broke ground on Monday (27).

MC and spokesperson for the project, David Legge, welcomed everybody and described the US$2B facility as (once completed) “the largest private sector undertaking in the history of these islands”.  Then he introduced the esteemed Dr. Devi Shetti along with his partners to the attentive audience at High Rock, East End on Grand Cayman.

Dr. Shetti gave a broad overview of the project and said he wanted the facility to be known not only as one of the cheapest hospitals compared to North America but the safest and having the best quality care, too.  He mentioned the safety record of hospitals run by his US-based partner Ascension Health Alliance.

He wanted the facility, he said, to be “paperless”. He cited the Apple iPad. “Paper does not tell you if you are writing something wrong, but an iPad will smack your hand and tell you it’s not right.”

Technology, he explained, would be used to assist with diagnosis to allow remote monitoring of patients from India during the night shift in Cayman. This would be easy due to the time zone differences between India and Cayman.

“We believe that within five years, software will make smarter diagnoses than doctors. We believe within 10 years, it will become legally mandatory for every doctor to get a second opinion from software before starting treatment,” he said. Mistakes could be cut in half, he added.

The Indian surgeon said local people would have access to quality care at a reduced cost. “People usually die from a heart attack within the first hour and for people in Cayman that is more often than not when they are on the air-ambulance on the way to a hospital.”

The facility will employ over 200 workers in building it and Shetty announced that young Caymanians studying or wanting to study medicine could find a job at the hospital. He thought that medical visitors would stay longer in Cayman thus benefitting the local economy.

The official name for the project is Health City Cayman Islands and the first phase is the construction of a 140-bed tertiary care hospital costing $50M. This is scheduled to be operational in November 2013.

The entire facility will take fifteen years to complete and will house 2,000 beds on 200 acres of land. The multi-speciality hospital will comprise a tertiary-care hospital, an educational facility, a biotech park, an assisted living community and provide specialised services including open-heart/bypass surgery, heart-valve replacement, orthopedics, angioplasty, cancer treatment, bone-marrow transplant, nuclear medicine, and organ transplant.

Health City Cayman Islands is a joint venture between Shetty’s Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospitals of India and Ascension Health Alliance, a non-profit healthcare organization in the United States. Ascension Health Alliance will provide facilities planning, supply chain management and biomedical engineering services, while Narayana will run the hospital.

When it was Premier Hon. Mckeeva Bush’s time to speak he thanked local businessmen Gene Thompson and Harry Chandi as the “driving forces behind the project”. He said it was the advent of a new leg of the Cayman Islands’ economy – medical tourism and the project would be the “envy of the Caribbean”. The premier couldn’t help but mention the UK’s Foreign and Commonwealth’s involvement in budgetary control that now faced delay and oversight and the high cost of healthcare with the sending of patients overseas for treatment.

He also said during the next 10 years, the Health City Cayman Islands would add more than $3 billion to Cayman’s gross domestic product and mentioned difficulties in improvements to the facilities at Owen Roberts International Airport that would be needed. Although underway they were “already facing hurdles”.