Our main aim is to provide good healthcare: Bhaskar Rao

Hyderabad: The Krishna Institute of Medical Sciences (KIMS) hospital, which has become popular for providing quality healthcare at affordable prices, is now expanding its wings to neighbouring states like Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

In an exclusive interview to Hans India, Chairman and Managing Director of KIMs, Dr B Bhaskar Rao said that the main USP of KIMS has been affordable quality care with good technology and infrastructure. "Patients want quality care at affordable cost and the doctors want good infrastructure and technology. KIMs has both," he said.

Asked how the journey started, Dr Bhaskar Rao said that he started as a consultant but soon realised that a lot could be done in healthcare. He said, "When I went abroad to study, I saw how a fusion of infrastructure, technology and affordability was made possible".

Later, he said, he started a Trust Hospital Mahavir and Bollineni Hospital in Nellore. In the 1990s there were no tier two facilities in the super speciality. We built a multi-speciality hospital in Nellore providing all the tertiary care at an affordable cost, which was at 50 per cent less cost compared to the cities like Bengaluru, Chennai and Hyderabad. This he said had attracted large number of patients.

This success had made them have presence in seven places in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana. KIMs succeeded in stopping patients going to other cities for treatment and with this inspiration, he has moved to the equity market.

Replying to another question Rao said they made a lot of people invest in their company including the doctors and the Class-IV employees. It was sort of cooperative participation. Now the employees who had invested in the company have started owning the hospital.

Bhaskar Rao said one of the problems they had encountered during the journey was lack of proper management bandwidth. If you must expand to other parts of the country, one needs strong second line management. KIMs is now ready with second line management and hence decided to start hospitals in neighbouring states like Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

When asked how he feels about the Arogyasri scheme of which he was architect, Rao said it had helped a lot of people but he said the scheme has been diluted resulting in a problems for the government and the hospitals.

"When it was started in 2007, the purpose was to provide quality health care for socio economically poor and lower middle class. It was estimated that there will be 20 per cent in this category but now 90 per cent of the people become fall under this category.

On the issue of making health care easily accessible, Rao stressed on the need for promoting insurance. If you know the budget of your own family and categorise at least some percentage of every month's income for insurance major part of the problem of cost can be overcome. He said the expenditure for hospitals has increased. Technology is fast changing and new equipments have become costly. This increases the cost of medicare. Hence government should come up with a plan where there should be some sort of insurance so that the patients do not get burdened.

Rao further said that KIMs has high end facilities for treatment of Cancer including breast cancer. He said KIMs had released one mobile App 'KIMS Cancer App'. Wherever people have symptoms, they can enrol in the App Once enrolled they can come at any time and we will give 50 per cent concession.

Bhaskar Rao said that some treatments should be made compulsory in government hospitals. The best policy they can do is- for certain diseases the treatment should be in government hospitals only. There are government hospitals, technology and doctors. Some types of diseases should be referred to govt hospitals under Arogyasri. Patients should be referred to private hospitals only if they do not have facilities to treat those diseases. For example, common fever, Appendix, normal and caesarean delivery etc need not be referred to private hospitals.