Devi Shetty

Early life

Shetty was born at village Dakshina Kannada district, Karnataka, India. The eighth of nine children, he decided to become a heart surgeon when he was in tenth grade at school after hearing about Dr. Christiaan Barnard, a South African surgeon who had just performed the world's first heart transplant. After completing his graduate degree in Medicine and post-graduate work in General Surgery from Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore, he trained in cardiac surgery at Guy's Hospital in the United Kingdom

Career

He returned to India in 1989 and initially worked at B.M. Birla Hospital in Kolkata. He performed the first neonatal heart surgery in the country on a 9-day-old baby named "Ronnie" 1992 a successful operation in medical history. In Kolkata he operated on Mother Teresa after she had a heart attack and subsequently served as her personal physician. After some time, he moved to Bangalore and started the Manipal Heart Foundation at Manipal Hospitals, Bangalore. Financial contribution for the construction of the hospital was provided by Shetty's father-in-law. He was elected as the chief patron of Indian Association of Clinical Cardiologists during the annual scientific session IACCCON 2013 at Bangalore.

In 2001, Shetty founded Narayana Hrudayalaya (NH), a multi-specialty hospital in Bommasandra on the outskirts of Bangalore. He believes that the cost of healthcare can be reduced by 50 percent in the next 5–10 years if hospitals adopt the idea of economies of scale. Apart from cardiac surgery, NH also has cardiology, neurosurgery, paediatric surgery, haematology and transplant services, and nephrology among various others. The heart hospital is the largest in the world with 1000 beds performing over 30 major heart surgeries a day. The land on which the health city was built, was previously a marshland which was reclaimed for this purpose. The Health City intends to cater to about 15,000 outpatients every day. In August 2012, Shetty announced an agreement with TriMedx, a subsidiary of Ascension Health, to create a joint venture for a chain of hospitals in India. In the past Narayana Hrudayalaya has collaborated with Ascension Health to set up a health care city in the Cayman Islands, planned to eventually have 2,000 beds.

Shetty also founded Rabindranath Tagore International Institute of Cardiac Sciences (RTIICS) in Kolkata and signed a memorandum of understanding with the Karnataka Government to build 5,000-bed specialty hospital near Bangalore International Airport. His company signed a MOU with the Government of Gujarat, to set up a 5,000 bed hospital at Ahmedabad.

He was a part of the seven-member panel of Board of Governors which replaced the MCI and served for a period of one year before it was further reconstituted.

Low cost health care

Shetty aims for his hospitals to use economies of scale, to allow them to complete heart surgeries at a lower cost than in the United States. In 2009 the Wall Street Journal newspaper described him as "the Henry Ford of heart surgery". Six additional hospitals were subsequently planned on the Narayana Hrudayalaya model at several cities in India, with plans to expand to 30,000 beds with hospitals in India, Africa and other countries in Asia. Shetty aims to trim costs with such measures as buying cheaper scrubs and using cross ventilation instead of air conditioning. That has cut the price of coronary bypass surgery to 95,000 rupees ($1,583), half of what it was 20 years ago. In 2013 he aimed to get the price down to $800 within a decade. The same procedure costs $206,385 at Ohio’s Cleveland Clinic. He has also eliminated many pre-ops testing and innovated in patient care such as "drafting and training patients’ family members to administer after-surgical care". Surgeons in his hospitals perform 30 to 35 surgeries a day compared to one or two in a US hospital. His hospitals also provide substantial free care especially for poor children. In many parts of rural northern India, the poor refer to Dr. Shetty as Bypasswale Baba, i.e. the Saint who Grants Bypasses. Also very much like the saints of yore, no one who wants a bypass and comes to his hospital/ashram leaves without a bypass.

Shetty and his family have a 75 percent stake in Narayana Hrudayalaya which he plans to preserve. Dr. Shetty has also gone heavily into e-Health. For example, by pioneering low-cost diagnostic services.

Yeshasvini

Yeshasvini is a low-cost health insurance scheme, designed by Shetty and the Government of Karnataka for the poor farmers of the state, with 4 million people currently covered.

Awards and recognition