Four Bangalore brains to reduce a city's pain

For Dr Arvind Srinivasan Chari, Bharath Srinivasan, Janesh Krishnan and Sankarshan Sridharan, the past few weeks have been heady ride.

Poring over documents and measuring "operational efficiency" of hospitals in India and Singapore, the four will soon bring to a culmination a project they had won a few months ago: they will be submitting their recommendations for improving the healthcare sector of Singapore to the Singaporean government.

The four — students at the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (IIM-B) — had won a global competition to execute a project for the government of Singapore, thereby becoming the only team from the country to have won the contest.

The project, ‘Contact Singapore’, conducted by the ministry of manpower, Singapore, is a competition open to higher-education institutes worldwide. Last year Harvard Business school, Cambridge University and Massachusets Institute of Technology had participated in the contest.

Currently pursuing post-graduate programme (PGP) year 2, the four, who competed with three other teams, said the quality of experience at hospitals was not good. "Since there is lot of waiting time, occupancy is more than 90 % on an average. For instance, Singapore General Hospital has an occupancy of 95%, when it should not cross 80-85%,” said Chari.