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In addition, the hospital offered a scheme called Karuna Hrudaya, which allowed financially constrained patients to pay Rs. 65,000 (US$1,400) per OHS, with NH absorbing the remaining costs. For patients who could not afford this package, the Narayana Hrudayalaya Trust, a charitable organization with offices within the hospital, helped to arrange funds from a general corpus or by specifically seeking donations from a list of individuals and organizations.
Dr. Shetty, looking a full 10 years younger than his 50 years, proceeded to lay out his vision for the future of the hospital: “We have only completed Phase I. In Phase II, we will have over 100 acres of facilities. We are planning on 800 beds, 30 operating rooms, and 20,000 surgeries a year. Besides the hospital, we will build a teaching institute for cardiologists, cardiac surgeons, and other health-care specialists.”
Even as he spoke of his vision, his youthful appearance melted away. He now looked adolescent, almost a 10-year-old with a dream:
“Look,” he said, pointing in the direction of the neighboring Electronic City and Infosys, one of India’s, and indeed the world’s, leading software services firm, “they are world class, because their quality keeps going up as their costs decrease. Health care is a peculiar beast where in spite of all the new technology, costs keep going up all the time. That is a strange paradox. We are out to buck that trend. We cannot afford to let the masses be deprived of top-class tertiary care. That is why my vision is to create a new health-care economic model, and within a radius of several miles, we want to create a Health City with a capacity of 5,000 beds and treatment for everything—oncology, neurology, nephrology, orthopedics—everything,” he concluded with a youthful smile as though this task was well within his grasp.
In keeping with his expansive vision was this quote adorning the walls of his office: “Most of the things worth doing in the world had been declared impossible before they were done.”
Born in south India, Dr. Shetty studied medicine in Mangalore, India and trained and operated for six years at Guy’s Hospital in London. When he returned to India in 1989, he joined the Birla Heart Research Foundation, a hospital in Calcutta, which he described as a microcosm of the country: “[Calcutta is] a magnified village [of India] with well-equipped hospitals but extremely poor people unable to afford modern health care.”
It was in Calcutta that Dr. Shetty cofounded the Asia Heart Foundation (AHF), a nonprofit organization, with Dr. Alok Roy. Apart from assisting in commissioning the BM Birla Heart Research Institute of Calcutta in 1989 and the Manipal Heart Foundation of Bangalore in 1997, the AHF decided to promote its own hospital in Calcutta, the Rabindranath Tagore Institute (RTI) of Cardiac Sciences, a 150-bed heart hospital with 3 OTs and a 22-bed intensive therapy unit. By 2004, RTI was the largest heart hospital in east India.
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