Dr. Sabahat S Azim, a former IAS officer and a doctor in West Bengal has undertaken an initiative to make healthcare more accessible and affordable, looking to help more than 70 per cent of India’s population living in the villages.Dr. Azim has come up with an innovative design which will cut cost for the hospital in terms of infrastructure and unnecessary procedures which will enable the hospital to offer its services at lower costs.
It all started from the remote corner of Sonamukhi in Bengal’s Bankura district. With the nearest hospital being 45 kilometres away, a team of 13 doctors and 18 nurses ensured that the hospital catered to at least 200 patients every day, including BPL families and just within six months of launching the first Glocal hospital in July 2011, the hospital had reached the break-even point.
“They have proved that social good and profit can go hand in hand,” says Sandeep Farias, Founding Partner of Elevar Equity, which invested Rs 15 crore in the company along with Sequoia Capital India in January 2011.
It was the untimely death of his father that led Azim, a trained medical doctor, to launch Glocal in July 2010. “My father died due to unnecessary treatments. I thought, if this can happen to me, a doctor and an IAS officer, what about others?” he said.
At Glocal, his team has come up with a protocol-driven model, where the computerized system will help the doctor automate diagnosis of 42 diseases, ranging from ischemic heart disease to malaria, which they identified was affecting 95% of the patients. Azim points out that he is able to charge lower fees by restricting the infrastructure and protocols to the bare minimum.
While a typical 100-bed hospital is about 70,000 square feet in size, Glocal has been able to restrict it to 30,000 square feet thus keeping cost of construction lower.
At around Rs 8 crore for a 100-bed hospital, a Glocal hospital is built at about 50% of the cost of a private secondary hospital. The company aims to reach over Rs 28 crore in revenue in fiscal year 2014. As Azim begins Glocal’s expansion beyond West Bengal, he is not resting on his laurels. “It has been exciting so far but there is much more work to do,” he says.As this laudable venture looks at a future girdled with success, our country’s sub-urban and rural areas can heave a sigh of relief as for a simple fact, Glocal charges Rs 10,000 for a caesarean section, which costs about Rs 50,000 in other private hospitals – Glocal is an innovative design for a country in need…
source:::: siliconindia net
Natarajan
