The Narayana Hrudayalaya center is primarily the brain child of Devi Shetty who initially trained at Guys Hospital in London where Philip Deverall, a British pioneering and innovative paediatric heart surgeon was based. He has no formal postgraduate cardiac qualifications unlike most Indian cardiac surgeons. However, apart from the thousands of cases he has carried out, he has conducted hundreds of seminars, wrote innumerable papers, created many training programs and of course built and managed quite a few heart hospitals.

Devi Shetty is living proof that clinical and operative skills may not necessarily be congruent to academic qualifications, something our local MMC (Malaysian Medical Council) should wake up to. Dedication and commitment could be far more valuable factors. In fact in all likelihood; Devi Shetty might not even get a job if he applies for one at the MOH as his qualifications would have been deemed by our “elite” council members as “not recognised”

Shetty returned to India in 1989 to set up a hospital for the Birla group in Calcutta before ultimately moving onto Bangalore to found the Narayana in 2001. He is married to Shakunthala Shetty, the daughter of the wealthy construction magnate Sri Charmakki Narayana Shetty, who owned the land where the 800 bedded hospital is situated.

The Narayana Hrudayalaya is located in the Bommasandra Industrial Area on the outskirts of Bangalore on 25 acres of land, 30 km from the old Bangalore airport and 50km from the new one. The grimy road leading to the hospital where the pillars of Bangalore’s off/on Metro project stick out like sore thumbs may not really be palatable to Malaysian patients or parents used to our highways. But the hospital itself is a remarkable story.

The hospital design is simple and furnishing is bare. It has 25 operating theaters for cardiac surgery alone of which half are currently operational. Shetty’s group which includes surgeons trained in India, Australia, Britain and Russia carry out an astonishing 20 to 30 open heart surgeries a day, clocking close to almost 6000 cases a year. Of these a third are congenital cases.

Maintain good results

Devi Shetty is one of India’s many rising entrepreneurial hospital pioneers who have contributed immensely to not only healthcare in India but also to its economy. They believe not only in bringing world class healthcare to India’s poor but are firm believers of strict financial prudence so that treatment remains extremely cost effective, a culture virtually absent in the Malaysian healthcare scene especially in government hospitals.

In a country where the incidence of congenital heart disease is 8 per 1000 births against a questionable 1 per 1000 in Malaysia, India has 180,000 children born with congenital heart defects every year with 90,000 requiring early intervention at the neonatal stage.

Shetty’s strategy for success is simple. Focus on maintaining good results which are the accepted 2% mortality for adult cases and an incredible 5% mortality for congenital heart surgery considering that some very complex cases end up here. And an innovative packaged price for treatment. Heart hospitals are expensive. And if you are going to extend complex world class surgery to the poor, then, to make that buck, you need to operate a large volume of cases which is not a problem in India. Shetty maintains a fixed price of almost RM10,000 ringgit for each paediatric case no matter how complex the lesions are, making his money back through volume.

He doesn’t compromise on equipment which is pretty similar to the ones Malaysian hospitals have. He further saves on costs especially on medication, equipment and consumables which are indigenously manufactured. But the most important asset he has is the great depth in staff required to look after patients. And this he does by having active academic programs which is headed completely by a dedicated academic dean.

No one is actually sure why Dr Chua Soi Lek was attracted to this hospital. Perhaps he was impressed by the shear numbers of the assembly like care patients received in diagnostics, theater and especially the ICU. Or maybe he was influenced by an ex-senior health ministry official who is the Dean of a local private medical school which has a twinning program with a medical school in Bangalore where Shetty maintains a branch.

Whatever it is, Shetty has done remarkably well. And this he managed to achieve through sheer hard work and perseverance. To operate such a large volume of cases with a low mortality he would have had to climb that agonizing learning curve and cross a lot of dead bodies, something Malaysian surgeons are anathema to, focusing rather on safe, less complex cases. To be successful in paediatric cardiac surgery you will have to run through that deadly gauntlet that ended the careers of Professor James Wisheart and Janardan Dhasmana at the Bristol Royal Infirmary in 1999. Both found out to their costs that taking the risky gamble of operating on paediatric cardiac surgical patients with iffy paediatric cardiologists, anesthetists and ICU staff can not only end your career but may get you profoundly vilified for the rest of your life.

But certainly Shetty’s hospital is not the only one doing similar surgery at these prices. There are almost 200 centers in India that offer heart surgery in India. In South India alone, the level of work that is carried out at the Narayana is done in 11 other paediatric cardiac surgical centers with the total number of paediatric cardiac surgical units throughout India numbering about 20. Some of these centers like the Amrita Heart Institute, Cherian Heat Foundation, Madras Medical Mission, Ramachandra Medical College, CMC Vellore, MIOT and the Asian Heart Institute in Bombay produce very good results but do not match Shetty’s costs.

On average, the cost of treating a congenital heart defect can cost between RM20-30,000 per case. Surprisingly only a single government hospital, the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS) in Delhi, does any neotatal cardiac surgery of note. And every heart surgeon in the private sector in India will swear that the price of similar surgery at the government funded AIIMS is far costlier then the ones done in private centers, a testimony that accountability in subsidized healthcare is almost always never accountable to anyone, anywhere around the world including Malaysia.

Solutions

The MOH stated that an agreement had been reached to operate on 200 children at a cost of RM10,000 for each child over a period of one year excluding incidental costs. These costs would be probably flight fares, food, accommodation, etc which may put the cost at about RM15,000 or more, provided there are no complications. Paediatric cardiac surgical cases are generally divided into cyanotic and acyanotic babies, meaning blue and non-blue babies. It is the blue babies that are difficult to manage, are costlier to operate on and generally would require complex surgery including initial palliative surgery if expertise for complete correction is not available in the first instance.

The ministry could outsource non-blue baby and palliative surgery for blue babies to local private hospitals at a competitive price as this will be logistically more suitable for the family. Blue babies that will require complex staged surgery could perhaps be flown to Bangalore although there will be risks involved for the three-hour flight and that perilous road journey to the Narayana itself.

Alternatively it could ask local surgeons or their surgical teams in “not so busy” private hospitals to operate in the Ministry’s government units so that there are savings in consumables and theater time. Since the ministry has the infrastructure but not the staff, perioperative care could also be contracted out.

Or it could invite foreign surgical teams or surgeons to operate at its heart units on a regular basis to do surgery. Cases that don’t require urgent surgery could be accumulated and be done on a regular monthly basis with our local surgeons and hospital staff looking after them. It would be a good learning experience for them although cases need to be carefully chosen.

Or allow private hospitals to employ these foreign surgeons or teams directly and the ministry outsources the work to these hospitals. Foreign medical staff, especially surgeons, anesthetists and cardiologists could be offered incentives like PR and citizenship etc so that they stay back in this country.

And importantly, the universities and the MOH have to revise their training programs to ensure that Malaysia’s expertise in this area rises to match the number of patients in this country.

Whoever did this marketing for the Bangalore team may have done Shetty a large favour and a disservice to cardiac care in this country. But this story is the natural end result of a poorly managed service that saw no proper audit in cost production ratios. It is sad refection of the state of services in this country where for far too long the focus has been on constructing sophisticated infrastructure without paying attention to human development in direct contrast to India where the reverse has taken place.

Before the minister dives into the uncharted National Health Financing Scheme, he should perhaps ponder if outsourcing healthcare to private hospitals that offer competitive pricing is a better option. The Ministry should refrain from reinventing the wheel all the time by building more heart units that only make contractors and suppliers rich, and instead save its financial resources and perhaps outsource its work to hospitals that provide a service at very cost effective prices. You can save a whole lot of money in places like Kota Kinabalu where instead of blowing 70 million ringgit, you can buy services from the Sabah Medical Center where its cardiac operating theater and 12 ICU beds are almost always lying idle.

Competition and innovation is the key to lower prices and better services. If the Malaysian public is to be saved, the confrontational policies of the previous former minister and DG must end. There must be greater cooperation between the large numbers of private doctors and the public service. Failure by the new minister, Liow Tiong Lai, to handle this impasse effectively will ultimately see not only cardiac going India way but a whole lot more of other specialties.

AHMAD SOBRI is a surgeon who has served in both the public and private sectors in Malaysia for 20 years. He is currently based in South England and his interests include resuscitative techniques including reanimation. His work also includes health policies, planning and finance.