•COOMI KAPOOR: Tell us about Medicity and why you felt it so important to set up an institution of its kind?

I was in the US for 20 years and many Indians came to New York for their surgeries, spending ten times the money and leaving their families behind. We were not able to provide cardiac services in India. That’s when I decided to come back to India and build Escorts Heart Institute with Mr Hari Nanda. We built it into one of the largest heart institutes in the world. In India, we have been blindly following research and developments in the West. We don’t have the data, we don’t have the means to collect the data and analyse it properly to see whether there are alternatives for a population like ours. I realised there is no hope for our country if we follow others blindfold. That’s when I felt it was important to start the process of our own therapies, our own research, our own diagnostics. At the same time, if there are therapies or synergies available in traditional medicine such as ayurveda, ayurpathy, unani which we are able to successfully amalgamate with modern medicine, then we might come up with better therapies which are less invasive to the human body, equally effective and maybe cost one third the price. Medicity was formed with this idea in mind.  

•SONAL VIJ: How do you plan to provide affordable healthcare?

It’s a mindset. In all the years that I was at Escorts, we never advertised the hospital. Still, we went from 150 beds to 330 beds and every day we had to turn back 20-30 patients. They felt if they came to this hospital they would get honest, cutting-edge treatment at a cost which was declared, not hidden. That enabled us to get Rs 12 crore worth of equipment and I built five hospitals in three years. Now we are planning to give 5 per cent of our services free and incrementally provide 6,000 villages with 24x7 telemedicine. The idea of Medicity is, if you reach Medicity you will be treated.  

... contd.