<div>July 19, 1958, in the little lanes of a small town Derabassi, Punjab was born a man who is now on track to change the face of healthcare in India. With the goal of being a doctor, ambition of being successful and the dream of being a leader at the tender age of 12, Dr Dinesh Batra started his quest to make a difference such that he leaves healthcare in a better position than he found it. Working his way through various hospitals across city and state boundaries from bottom to the top, Dr Batra was probably at the peak of his 25 year-long medical career when he was the CEO of Primus hospital in Chanakya Puri. Realizing, he had reached the peak on the path he was going with a lot of work and passion still left in him, he decided to change his path.</div><div> </div><div><table align="right" border="1" cellpadding="2" cellspacing="2" style="width: 200px"><tbody><tr><td><img alt="" src="http://bw-image.s3.amazonaws.com/Dr-Dinesh-Batra-mdm.jpg" style="width: 200px; height: 200px; margin: 1px; float: right;"></td></tr><tr><td><strong>Dr Dinesh Batra, Director, Cygnus Hospitals</strong></td></tr></tbody></table>Thus began the journey of Cygnus Hospitals with four doctors and a pharma entrepreneur (namely Dr Sudhir gupta, Dr Naveen Nishchal, Dr Shuchin Bajaj, Dr V. K. Rajoria and Mr Sunil Bhayana) who were concerned more with the health of others than the comfort of their own homes. A company, which started with this team, who would give their services for a fee to get some revenue going, started to gain momentum with the acquisition of a Hospital in Dwarka on Oct 1, 2011. Today, Cygnus Hospitals runs 10 hospitals across 3 states and is starting to become a known name in healthcare in North India. While starting the journey, a lot of effort went into studying Healthcare evolution and it was found that the myth surrounding the fact that it is difficult to get return on investment in smaller towns was broken. We decided not to invest in land and building which is a major capex investment. All Cygnus hospitals are either on lease or revenue sharing. The business model of Cygnus Hospitals revolves around taking up Underutilized units in tier 2 and tier 3 cities or leasing the assets created by third party, converting them into super specialty hospitals in order to ensure secondary and tertiary care in the remotest of areas around India. With hospitals currently running in cities like sonepat, panipat, karnal, Kurukshetra, Bhatinda, Tohana, amongst others, and newer ones coming up in small cities of Punjab and Rajasthan, Cygnus aims to take healthcare in India where it’s never ventured before, the smaller towns. </div><div> </div><div>Healthcare, as any other industry, faces three core issues which Cygnus through its business model hopes to resolve. The first one is availability. In a recent survey it was found that the ratio of beds to people in India is woefully lower than the standards set by the WHO. With the coming up of multiple hospitals that are being converted from underutilized units, Cygnus Hospitals aims to not only make that ratio more favorable but also not use additional land in doing so. The second issue is that of accessibility. Many big names in healthcare provide excellent services but only in big cities as a result of which the urban market is now saturated. Compare the 5 star facilities of a hospital in Delhi to a underutilized unit lying empty in a small town in Haryana and you notice a stark contrast. Healthcare services in tier 2 and tier 3 cities is still beyond reach and people have to travel long distances before they get access to proper healthcare. By taking healthcare to these smaller cities, Cygnus aims to eradicate that problem. Finally, there is the issue of affordability. Most people cannot afford the treatment at the prices some of the bigger chains charge in big cities. With Cygnus taking healthcare to tier 2 and tier 3 cities at a price range comfortable to the people of those cities, it wants to ensure that healthcare in this country is available, accessible and affordable. </div><div> </div><div>On being asked what was missing from tier 2 and tier 3 cities that Cygnus has provided, the answer was three pronged. There is a lack of facilities available to treat the three most common occurrences in these towns. The first one is medical emergencies which refer to strokes, shock, poisoning. The infrastructure and machinery required to deal with such cases is lacking. The second is trauma which requires a neurosurgeon to be able to fully gage the extent of the trauma. The third is cardiac arrests or heart problems which are the most common. The number of neurosurgeons and cardiologists is extremely low in more than 90 per cent of these cities. When there is an attempt to send the specialists, there is a lack of instruments and infrastructure which they can use. These are the three biggest contributions of Cygnus to these smaller towns which have contributed to saving hundreds and thousands of life because specialized treatment was available at the right time. On further being asked on how far he plans to take this, he said Cygnus wanted to work towards an idealistic scenario where each district in this country has a super specialty hospital and a parallel private healthcare structure is in place so not one out of the 1.25 billion people in this country ever die because they had problems with availing, accessing or even affording healthcare. </div><div> </div><div>The Cygnus vision was given a boost when it expanded to include Altius medicare and gain the trust of investors like Somerset and Fidelity to invest in them to help Cygnus grow. With the help of these developments and the business acumen possessed by Dr Batra and fellow directors, Cygnus is now expanding quickly. A plan of having 15 hospitals by March 2016 and 50 by March 2017 expanding to cover more states, the vision of healthcare for all might not be too distant a reality. A journey that started while growing up in a tier 2 city of Kurukshetra noticing the lack of proper healthcare facilities is now at a point where many kurkshetras across the country will have the same quality healthcare as any big metropolitan. Since 2011, when Cygnus first began, Dr Batra and Cygnus have come a long way, but as they themselves will admit, the journey has only just begun.</div><div> </div>
