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DR SABAHAT AZIM Founder & CEO, Glocal Healthcare
PROTOCOL FOR SUCCESS
Q uality, affordability and accessibility! Issues in Indian healthcare that have been debated and deliberated upon, time and again, without arriving at workable solutions, especially in the rural areas. However, there are two kinds of people in this world – sayers and doers and Dr Sabahat Azim belongs to the latter ilk. So while the debates continued unabated, Dr Azim, a doctor and IAS officer turned entrepreneur, suited actions to words and started his own venture, Glocal Healthcare in July 2011, to provide quality and affordable healthcare to the rural masses in the country.
The inception The idea for his venture took root when Dr Azim was serving as an IAS officer in the remote areas of Tripura. Those days brought him, as he calls it, an important ‘take away’ that there is no worthwhile healthcare service available to most of the people across the country. He found that there are either dysfunctional public sector hospitals or very expensive quarternary-tertiary corporate hospitals. He also realised that an average rural Indian spends over a thousand rupees per year on healthcare and that about 3.3 per cent of the country’s population falls below the poverty line due to this expenditure and laments that it is quite unnecessary since it is very much possible JANUARY 2013
to deliver high quality healthcare below these costs. Glocal Healthcare is an attempt to prove exactly that.
Laying the foundation One might argue that there are several other players who are attempting to achieve the same goals, so what makes Dr Azim’s venture different from the rest of them? Well, the uniqueness lies in the fact that Glocal Healthcare Hospitals are the only rural corporate hospitals in the country. System and protocol are virtues that Dr Azim imbibed during his days as an IAS officer and he incorporated these qualities to good effect in his entrepreneurial endeavour as well. He has attempted to replicate the principles of the highly successful ‘Toyota Production System’ in healthcare i.e. to design out overburden and inconsistency, and to eliminate waste. Hence, his business model is based on creating a fully functional healthcare system that estimates the disease load and creates protocols for diagnosing and managing them. His hospitals run on an inhouse developed IT system with built in artificial intelligence known as Medical Diagnosis & Management System (MDMS). Dr Azim claims that this system offers 92 per cent accuracy in diagnosing diseases and giving pre-designed management protocols. The health outcomes achieved through them are measured constantly and the results are titrated to tweak protocols as per requirements. This helps the hospitals to function smoothly and systematically, reduce unnecessary investigations and interventions and reduce the cost of delivery
of healthcare. Dr Azim informs that their artificial intelligence system has opened up a huge opportunity for growth and that when their prototype gets completed they will be proficient to enable healthcare diagnosis and management across the world from subSaharan Africa to Mongolia without the need for human capital. His words gain credence from the fact that in a year and half his venture has gone from one hospital to a chain of five hospitals.
Growing to the next level Dr Azim has huge plans for his undertaking and intends to take some pivotal steps towards achieving his goals in the coming year. His strategy includes investing Rs 400 crores to build 50 new hospitals across six states i.e. Bihar, UP, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Orissa and West Bengal. He aims to raise the funds through a mix of both debt (65 per cent) and equity (35 per cent), just as he had raised funds for his first hospital. This move is expected to increase Glocal Healthcare hospital bed count to 5500 by
WORDS of
WISDOM
“The only way to ensure healthcare to everyone is to enrol everyone in health insurance plans like RSBY or microhealth insurance. This will enable delivery of healthcare at lower costs by hospitals and will remove poverty due to healthcare expenditures.”
the end of 2014. Thus, 2013 is going to play a very crucial role in his entrepreneurial journey. Making Glocal Healthcare Hospitals one of India’s largest healthcare providers, in terms of number of beds and number of patients treated, is his vision for the next five years.
Plugging the loopholes Glocal Healthcare’s founder has set himself a very worthy goal but achieving it would be no cakewalk. He himself admits that getting adequately skilled manpower is a huge challenge. Since his model is all about working efficiently and eliminating wastage by reducing time and space, having the right professionals, though few, is of paramount importance. Recognising this he has set up his own skill development centres in all hospitals where nurses/technicians passed out of government colleges are trained and equipped with the appropriate skills. Again, he has plans to expand across the country and expansion needs a constant inflow of funds. Raising them would be another issue that he will have to tackle. He also needs to guard against any hitches in his working system since they can derail the entire process and putting it all together would be very time-consuming and tedious, thereby defeating the whole purpose of his venture. But all said and done, it is undeniable that Dr Azim has managed to put together a good working solution for the dearth of quality and affordable healthcare in the rural areas of India. Lakshmipriya Nair lakshmipriya.nair@expressindia.com
www.expresshealthcare.in
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