Kovai Medical Center & Hospital: Providing Excellent Quality Medical Care and Services to Patients in a Family Focused Environment

The leading super specialty hospitals in India always put their patients first. They deliver compassionate care and are committed towards achieving excellence in their endeavors. These hospitals foster a culture of innovation; they are ready to take risks in order to take medical science to new heights. One such prominent super specialty hospital which is transforming lives, while nurturing innovation in medical science and healthcare is none other than Kovai Medical Center & Hospital (KMCH).

It has been offering relentless services over the past 30 years, which has taken healthcare to the most modern levels in the region catering to urban and rural population. In an interview with Insights Success, team KMCH shares about its journey, its various services, the various challenges that it has faced, its mission and vision, and its plans. Following are the highlights of the interview:

Enlighten us with the journey of your hospital so far.

Kovai Medical Center & Hospital is India’s second oldest corporate hospital. It was founded in 1986 and opened its doors in 1990. It has grown from a 250-bed hospital to a 25-acre campus with a 1000 bed multispecialty hospital and a 600-bed medical college. It is a multiorgan transplant center and is currently India’s fourth largest kidney transplant unit. It provides the latest in ICU care, cardiac care, neuro &neurosurgical care, orthopedics, interventional radiology, cancer care and robotic surgery.

Give a detailed summary of the key personality(s) life before and after their entry into the healthcare space. 

The Hospital is founded by NRIs and led by Dr Nalla G Palaniswami who was a practicing physician in USA who decided to try and bring the latest in healthcare back to India. They raised money from family, friends and other NRIs to form a corporate hospital. The first years were very tough and additional rights issue was required to stabilize the finances.

Despite many trials and tribulations early in the hospital formation in the 1990’s it grew from strength to strength and now is a national leader in the healthcare space and doing leading edge care. Growth and development have been a continuous focus for delivering more and more services and specialized care bringing international levels of excellence to local people.

Kindly talk about different care packages and services offered by your hospital. 

We are a multi-specialty hospital which has almost every service. In organ transplant we do kidney, liver, heart, bone marrow, pancreas, and lung transplant. We are a large tertiary ICU set up with Specialized Neurology and neurosurgery units. We are a large cardiac and STEMI research center. We are well known interventional radiology center. We have a large tertiary Obstetrics & Gynaecology and Fetal medicine department as well. Our Cancer center is growing and we are expanding into genetics.

What is the vision and mission of your hospital? 

The vision of the hospital is to bring the latest in healthcare available in the world and make it available to Indians. With additional goal is to create a longstanding institution which will sustain innovative healthcare and build the next generation of doctors.

What kind of challenges has your hospital and its team faced at the time of its inception? 

The 1990s were a tough time to start hospitals. Although common now, only 50 % of corporate hospitals survived in those years. The financial situation was very tough. Patient population had very low spending capacity especially in a tier two city. The supply chain was poor. Companies often would only supply older model equipment. Like in most places in India, a referral cut business was in practice.  By focusing on patient care and quality and ethical practice of medicine, we grew despite these challenges, and we laid the base for sustainable success.

How the technological advancements and innovation in the healthcare space has influenced your hospital’s daily operations? 

Although we are financially disciplined, our goal was to bring western standards of healthcare to India. We invested wherever we could in technology we could bring to the common man, even in the early days. We quickly realized:

1. The Indian patients also wanted the best in healthcare and with our diaspora, they are very knowledgeable.
2. The doctors were motivated and would excel if we invested in them. Even in 1990, we were using computers for operations.

We were TCS’s very first domestic clients back then. Technology should be viewed through the prism of developing long term better patient care. It may take a while, but the investments are worth it. That is our 30-year belief.

What advice would you like to give to the young doctors and healthcare enthusiasts who are stepping into the medical business? 

• Always continue to develop. 
• Stick to your core values if you do good service patients will come.
• Patience and a long view are required for sustained success. Rarely it will happen overnight. How can you learn if you have never failed?

What does the future look like for your hospital in terms of growth and expansion?

Our goal is continued growth and to become an international healthcare institution. Our medical college is one of the paths, we see to grow on the academic and research and development side of healthcare. It is in its second year of operation. We plan to grow it and break the top 30 ranks of medical colleges in India. We plan to grow and develop the main center to even higher levels. We plan to add more centers and ultimately become more than just a group of hospitals but a healthcare network.

We all know the Covid-19 pandemic has created a lot of workloads for the caregivers and ancillary healthcare service providers. But what problems your hospital has faced specifically in this ongoing pandemic?

With the advent of our newly medical college on the same campus but only its second year of operation, we had more infrastructure capacity to handle more patients, but we did not have enough doctors, nursing, and paramedical staff. We were forced to push our staff to handle higher number of patients because the alternative for these patients were worse.

Our staff performed under tremendous pressure, and I am very proud of them, but there were still many people we had to turn down because we could not accommodate them. We have the ability to handle highly complex COVID cases and we are an ECMO center. We even created specialized Obstetrics & Gynaecology, paediatric, dialysis and post-transplant COVID units. We still had to turn down many calls for young sick patients in 30’s and 40’s.