 "How Apollo Hospitals' Prathap Reddy became the Ambani of healthcare")
From a single hospital with 150 beds, Prathap Chandra Reddy, founder of Apollo Hospitals Ltd, became India’s largest healthcare entrepreneur with over 50 hospitals in the country and abroad. Journalist Pranay Gupte brings you the full story of Reddy’s rise from humble origins in his book, Healer: Dr Prathap Chandra Reddy and the Transformation of India, published by Portfolio Penguin, New Delhi. The following are some interesting excerpts from the book.
On why Dr Reddy decided to set up Apollo Hospitals
How did Dr Prathap Chandra Reddy help transform India’s health care landscape? The creation of Apollo was the first step, after he’d returned home to India in 1970 after nearly a decade in the United States.
He lost a thirty-eight-year-old patient in Madras because the man could not mobilize the resources for a heart bypass operation in America.He was not able to save his own father, Raghava Reddy, who suffered from a brain haemorrhage, or his mother, who succumbed to cervical cancer. He could not save his dear friend Kumara Raja Muthiah, who died of a sudden heart attack.
Lodged in Dr Reddy’s mind is the thought that had Apollo been in existence then, the lives of all of them could conceivably have been saved. It is a powerful, atavistic thought, and it continues to drive him to continually search for better technologies and more sophisticated systems to improve health care in India.
That thought has engendered in Dr Reddy a relentless focus on how health care is delivered in a country of more than a billion people, most of them poor. He transformed health care by generating widespread awareness of a simple, sensible method - that prevention is better than cure.
He did it by building a system in urban and rural areas; more hospitals and clinics are in the pipeline. He did it by building training colleges for nurses, and schools for children in rural areas in the belief that education about health care should be part of the curriculum from an early stage - and that perhaps more students would want to go on to choose medicine as a career in a developing country such as India.
In the course of Dr Reddy’s thirty-year journey, he has truly transformed India’s health care landscape. Transformation, by definition, presupposes an unprecedented change of paradigms in one or all of the following attributes - scale, character, genre or value. When Apollo started in 1983, it was Dr Reddy’s belief, his charisma and his power to carry the team with him that gave life to what was essentially a vision.
On making affordable healthcare a reality
He actualized that vision with a deep abiding spiritual faith, and he did it with a self-confidence that motivated hundreds to join him in a venture that had seemed impossible - the creation of a nationwide hospital system in the corporate sector. ‘I took others with me,’ Dr Reddy said to me. ‘I emphasized that the true Apollo spirit is: If anything that can be done in the field of medicine anywhere in the world, we can do it better.’
Dr Reddy recognized that India seemed well on its way to becoming the world’s fourth largest economy, after the United States, China and the European Union. Business constituencies in America and elsewhere perceived exponential growth opportunities in a place that Winston Churchill had once dismissed as a land of fakirs.
It can be certainly said that the vision of Dr Prathap Chandra Reddy of Aragonda has been durable. Thirty years ago, when he started Apollo Hospitals, he named it Apollo after the Greek god of medicine, music, light, law and prophesy. Today, it has grown into one of the world’s largest such networks. And it is growing, both in size and in market value.
On how Dr Reddy named the hospital
One afternoon in Chennai, over a cup of steaming coffee with the celebrated astrologer D. Nagarajan in his modest two-room apartment, I heard an intriguing story of how Apollo Hospitals came to be adopted as a name by Dr Reddy.
‘He came to me quite excited about the name that he’d just registered - Apollo Hospital Enterprises,’ Nagarajan said. ‘I immediately sensed that the name wouldn’t work, and I told him that.’
Dr Reddy’s face fell. ‘What can I do now?’ he said. ‘I’ve already registered that name.’
Nagarajan did some quick numerological calculations.
‘Rename it “Apollo Hospitals”,’ he told Dr Reddy. ‘Add an “s” to Hospital. You will see how your business will grow into many hospitals.’
And so Apollo Hospital became Apollo Hospitals. That was three years before the first Apollo facility was inaugurated in Madras in 1983. Dr Reddy’s wife, Sucharitha, told me separately that well before her husband established Apollo, Nagarajan had read her hand and predicted that Dr Reddy would launch an enterprise that would benefit millions.
On what industrialist Mukesh Ambani told the author about Dr Reddy
This is what India’s leading industrialist Mukesh Ambani told me: ‘I have a hunch that, true to the name, Dr Reddy wanted to accomplish an Apollo-like dream in the field of medicine in India. How else can one explain the fact that an enterprise that began with a single 150-bed hospital in Chennai in 1983 has now grown into one of the largest health care providers in Asia with over 8,500 beds at more than fifty hospitals in India and abroad?
Paraphrasing the famous words of Neil Armstrong, the first astronaut to land on the moon ? “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” ? I would say that the one small but steadfast step that Dr Reddy took thirty years ago has now become a giant leap for the private sector-led world-class health care in India.
Say this for Dr Reddy: as with other remarkable entrepreneurs like Dhirubhai Ambani, he had foresight, of course, and he had a compelling vision. But, far more than most of his contemporaries, he took a great risk in an industry at a time when everybody advised him otherwise. When he embarked on establishing Apollo, almost no one - with the exception of his wife Sucharitha, and the astrologer Nagarajan - thought that Dr Reddy would succeed.
On Dr Reddy’s efforts at empowering women in Indian business
‘Dr Reddy’s other exemplary achievement is women’s empowerment in Indian business. His four daughters ? Preetha, Suneeta, Shobana and Sangita ? who have helped him so ably in building and running his enterprise, have shown that professionally well-qualified and capable women can be equal to their male counterparts in any enterprise, especially in the enterprise of health care.’
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Dr Reddy’s four daughters - Preetha, Suneeta, Shobana and Sangita - are all key executives at Apollo, and have been lauded for their talents. His ten grandchildren are increasingly assuming leadership roles. There will be continuity at Apollo in offering access to high quality clinical care - and affordable care.‘Where else in the world can you get such top-class medical treatment at such low cost?’ Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, the billionaire Mumbai-based investor and financier, told me.
On how Dr Reddy manages the twin jobs of being a healer and a businessman
‘At the end of the day, when you see smiling faces and you are satisfied that you have given your best to help people, that is what keeps you going. I truly enjoy what I do. There is no “secret” to the way I work. It’s simply passion. I never claim our success as my own.
Our success is the sum total of the dedicated enterprise of each and every member of the Apollo family. That is why I make it a point to meet as many Apollo family members as possible every day of the week, and every week of the year. Even when I am travelling, I stay in touch with my colleagues. And I always am in contact with our patients - whether through daily rounds of the wards, or by telephone. I call it offering the human touch; our patients say it is reassurance provided by a chairman who also happens to be a physician himself.
‘Whatever it is, I truly believe that medicine’s curative value is enhanced when the physician and other institutional personnel give personal attention to patients.
I believe that patients aren’t simply numbers - medicine is a matter of people, and that means paying special attention to people’s feelings, anxieties, trepidations, worries and hopes. It also must mean paying special attention to their aspirations for leading a healthy, productive life in a disease-free society.’
On the massive impact Dr Reddy has had on India’s healthcare industry
Consider the changes that flowed from Dr Reddy’s initiatives.
Among them: India’s pathetic casualty departments gave way to clean efficient emergency departments that functioned round the clock; an organ donation bill was passed enabling cadaver transplants; health insurance was introduced in India; new technology introduction in health care was now becoming commonplace; investments in the private sector health care industry grew sharply thanks to key legislative changes - in essence significantly increasing the reach of advanced health care and making it affordable to all across the country.
The noted philosopher and the inspiration behind the Isha Foundation, Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, says: ‘Dr Prathap Chandra Reddy has transformed the concept of health care in India. In many ways, we can demarcate health care in India as before Apollo and after. Sitting upon such laurels, the man himself is childlike, effervescent and joyful. His irrepressible enthusiasm at eighty is to be seen to be believed. He’s a devout being and a visionary entrepreneur, a true blessing for the nation.’
In view of such encomiums, I wondered how Dr Reddy kept himself anchored to his fundamental role as a ‘healer’. I asked him: How do you convey your competence to patients?
His response: ‘By creating in them a continuing belief that there are people - Apollo people - who care 24/7, and that there’s a system that works.’
That belief is earned: it is not fostered easily in men and women more accustomed to the unresponsiveness they encounter in many of India’s institutions of public service, particularly hospitals. It is also reinforced when a medical facility provides thoughtful aftercare to patients because a founder like Dr Reddy insists.
He also happens to be a thoroughly decent man who isn’t impressed by his own success - he is in fact one of the most decent and likeable figures I have known in public life since I entered international journalism in 1968.
Whether it’s a ward boy at a hospital, the chief minister of one of India’s twenty-eight states, the head of one of the country’s seven Union territories, or a visiting dignitary from overseas, Dr Reddy engages the person with an egalitarian warmth and curiosity. He is a man of endless questions - which is why it’s often difficult to interview him, because he’s always asking questions of his interviewer. In fact, this reversal of roles can be unsettling at times for a writer.
‘We are a team,’ he told me, ‘we are always a team. No one man could have created and sustained Apollo. From Day One, our total footprint was in the very best health care that could be offered to patients - and in preventive health care. It all happened because we simply didn’t give up, no matter what the obstacles were. Nowadays, of course, there are many others in the private-sector health care industry. We are not Massachusetts General, or Sloan-Kettering, or Johns Hopkins or Mayo Clinic. But believe me, none of them is what Apollo is today in our total health footprint. Apollo will continue this journey of transforming the form and delivery of health care. We led the journey in India. And the journey continues. You can take my word for it.’
Healer:Dr Prathap Chandra Reddy and the Transformation of India, by Pranay Gupte, published by Portfolio Penguin, New Delhi, December 2013. 548 pp, Indian price: Rs 899. (c) Pranay Gupte 2013
