Exclusive interview of   Dr. Santanu Chattopadhyay, MD (PGI), MRCP (UK), MBA (INSEAD), who is bringing fundamental change in healthcare, India by creating the Nationwide Healthcare Services Pvt. Ltd, based on the concept of  Personal physician. Dr. Santanu is founder and managing director of the company.

Introduction of Nationwide Primary Healthcare Services Pvt. Ltd.

Nationwide Primary Healthcare Services Pvt. Ltd is an initiative of a team of Indian doctors, who have returned to India after having worked with the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK, for over 10 years. Their vision is to bring back the best practices in Primary Healthcare to India and to provide world class primary healthcare solutions and health plans.

Nation Wide aims to provide primary health care services, health management solutions and health plans to individuals, private groups and corporates in India.

Nation Wide offers a range of health plans to cover individuals, corporates and NRIs'.

www.nationwidedocs.org

Could you tell us around the history where you decided to go ahead with this idea?

I have been nurturing the idea for last 10 years. While I was working as a doctor in UK, I used to keep a close eye on development of India. The IT industry used to fascinates me because of the fact that how leaders like Mr Narayana Murthy started a revolution which has brought a very big change to India impacting the whole economy and position of India in international community. I thought we can do similar things in healthcare with a huge impact to our population.

However, I realize that my training as a doctor makes me think only at a very ground and granular level and I couldn’t think at “50000 feet level view”. In other words I felt I have the vision but I don’t know how to get there. Hence I thought an MBA from good b-school will enable me to think more like a visionary as well as an executioner. INSEAD looked like a perfect school, where I focused mainly on strategy and leadership rather than domain expertise which I already had. However I realized that only theoretical knowledge will not take me to my dream and hence I joined Johnson & Johnson (Europe) to understand the how all the theories are put in practice in a structured fashion. After working for around 3 years, I thought it will be a good idea work in more unstructured environment to understand how a start-up works as opposed to a mature company. With a view to that I joined a start-up Life Scince KPO and started a new business vertical from scratch. I grew this vertical from 1 man to 100 within 3 years and made it profitable in very short period of time. This was a tremendous learning experience for me, when I felt I am now fully prepared for such a big dream.

At that time, I started talking Dr Shantanu Rahman who has practiced as a family physician in UK for long time. If you see the health statistics all around the world, you will see the countries (e.g. Scandinavian countries) which have the best primary healthcare infrastructure have the best health quality indicators. On the other hand countries like US who spends a much larger amount of GDP in their healthcare and focuses more on tertiary care do not have such good health outcomes.

Our analysis showed us that lot of investment and work is going in healthcare in India but almost all private players are focusing on secondary and tertiary healthcare. So we felt both from business perspective and societal impact perspective we should focus on primary healthcare and family medicine if we really want to bring fundamental change in Indian healthcare scenario. Hence we started toying with the idea on how do take a western model like NHS, UK and modify it to suit needs of Indian population. Thus we came up with the NationWide model where each clinics are manned by 5-7 Personal Physicians along with nurses and other support staff which provide primary care services for a community. The services will include GP consultations, home visits, 24/7 doctor on-call, basic investigation facilities such as blood tests and ECG, ambulance services along with referral services to secondary and tertiary care.

How do you foresee the future unfold for Personal Physician and EMR in

India and Globally?

We have now been in the market for few months. Within this short period we have developed a huge traction from all stakeholders. There is a clear need in the market which is currently not being addressed. Given the huge population of India there is a very large volume of market which is untapped.

From the societal impact perspective, this has potential to completely change the way the healthcare is delivered and disseminated in India.

I was recently invited to South Asia regional conference for a World Family Physician organization to present our model. We had an amazing response from other countries including developed countries who wanted to collaborate with us to develop something similar in their countries. So the scope is huge but the model needs to be modified as per the need of each country and the gap in their existing systems.

We will also need a model for our rural population where probably a PPP (Public Private Partnership) approach will be more suitable.

Any special message (closing remarks) you would like to share for the group   members.

Our mission is to bring significant and systemic changes in Indian healthcare scenario. It is quite a lofty vision and we don’t think we alone can do that change. We will need multiple players working in tandem taking various approaches to make this happen. We welcome various players or stakeholders to collaborate with us to make this dream come true which will benefit all of us.

How personal physician concept is different from family/ consultant physician?

Details are mention in table’