Sunday, April 02, 2006

CK Prahalad on Health Care

CK Prahalad on Health Care: "Health care, like everything else in India, is a paradox. Overall, health care in India is pitiable. But we have islands of world class. The Aravind Eye Hospital in Madurai, in Tamil Nadu, treats the largest number of eye cases in the world: 200,000 surgeries and 1.2 million outpatients in a year. Their outcomes are better than any large system, including Britain’s National Health System, but their cost is one-hundredth that of large systems . So here is a health care delivery model, a patient acquisition model, and a capital- and volume-intensive model that is extremely profitable. Narayana Hrudalaya, which is one of the largest heart hospitals in the world, is another model worth replicating. Has anyone asked why Narayana Hrudalaya is so cost-effective? Do people know that its chairman, Dr. Devi Shetty, uses high school graduates as echo-cardiology technicians? Can you tell the world that you do not need an M.D. to read an ECG; you don’t need this credential? You need skill building, and you can create skills to read ECGs with high school men and women. Dr. Shetty has made a lot of innovations in building teams: he has put world-class skilled doctors with high school graduates or even school dropout , and he has trained nurses in-house."
Now all we need to do is to use our skills to train and educate our patients !

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