Care Hospital, Banjara Hills

The Care Group acquired a 5-star hotel premises at Banjara Hills, Hyderabad in 2001 and converted it into 325-bed multi-speciality Hospital over a period of three years. "This marked an important milestone in transiting from single speciality to multi-speciality in the history of Care," says Dr Krishna Reddy, CEO and MD of Care Group of Hospitals, who was one of the founder members of the Group. Further growing, it opened a 100-bed unit at Vijayawada in 2005.

Focus and Innovation

"We have consistently adhered to the path of correct medical practices" - Dr Krishna Reddy CEO and MD Care Hospitals

Care has a core ideology —'Patient first, above our own interests' and a core purpose—'To practice medicine the way it should be'. "We have consistently adhered to the path of correct medical practices. We are also evolving a unique model to meet the challenge of balancing the interests of all stakeholders, while keeping the interest of the patient in the center," says Dr Reddy. Care Group believes that 'a Good Conscience can mean Good Business'.

Care Hospital has been instrumental in pioneering many techniques and has brought in various technologies. It houses the team that performed the first Percutaneous Transluminal Coronary Angioplasty (PTCA) in the country, when the team was at Nizam's Institute of Medical Sciences. The team developed the first indigenous coronary stent—the Kalam-Raju Stent—named after the two visionaries behind the project—Dr APJ Abdul Kalam and Dr B Soma Raju, who also is the founder member of Care Group. Robotic mitral valve replacement was also done for the first time in the country here.

Hurdles

Dr Reddy says that the first hurdle was to venture in a contra fashion of adherence to correct medical practices and still succeed. It was overcome by being prepared for a longer haul and persisting with ideals. The next hurdle was the transition from single to multi-speciality hospital, especially in bringing the new professionals in same alignment on mission and ideology and a model of teamwork.

The third hurdle was to learn the science and art of business management through good corporate governance. “The fourth and the most testing times came from the media over two unfortunate incidents involving prominent personalities, where we could not have done anything different than what was done in the best interests of the patients. We overcame the events by insisting on nothing but the truth," informs Dr Reddy. The last hurdle was in handling internal restructuring, which was done with the help of colleagues and friends.

Growth Plans

Dr Reddy reveals, "We are adopting a two-pronged strategy of maximising efficiency and innovating in capacity building to handle growth. We are not only tapping the growth within the state, but extending our footprints to other states. We are gearing up internally through strategies for operational excellence, human resource development, good clinical governance, and a robust technology backbone."

Future Plans

The vision for the next decade is to extend delivery networks across the width of the country from primary care to secondary care to tertiary care to home care, along with an integrated educational, training, and research programmes. Care dreams to be the model in healthcare.

"Considering the nature of our mission and ideology, it will be a slow but steady process to realise the dream," says Dr Reddy. Concrete short-term plans are to cover every state in the South and Central India during the coming year and then progress further during the next three-five years to the rest of the country.