Venture keeps family doctor tradition kicking

During a brief stint in the UK, doctor friends Shantanu Rahman and Santanu Chattopadhyay from Bangalore witnessed a vibrant structured system for family doctors.

While they were impressed how organised things were in that country, the duo realised that back home in India, family doctors mostly practiced independently, having no links with their counterparts, which often left the patients in a lurch when the doctor took a leave or retired.

In such a situation, they noticed, patients in over 75% cases rushed to specialists when there was no need.

Sensing a business opportunity in this, Rahman and Chattopadhyay decided to set up a chain of full-service and satellite clinics focused on the family doctor and primary healthcare.

“Somewhat like old wine in a new bottle,” echo the two, saying their objective was to re-package the neighbourhood general physician (GP) in a new avatar. 

Under their plan, the GP would no longer function as a lone entity out of a nondescript room with a just-out-of-college compounder dispensing multi-coloured “golis”.

Rahman and Chattopadhyay’s plan entailed adapting the traditional hub-and-spoke model to the family practice by setting up a full-service clinic spread across 1,500 square feet with 4 GPs and one to two paediatricians and nurses to cater to the patient inflow.

Working in close tandem with the full-service clinic would be a set of five satellite clinics operating from residential or corporate complexes, with one GP catering to complex residents or corporate employees.  All the GPs would collaborate and ensure that no patient is left to fend for himself anytime.

Today NationWide Primary Healthcare Services, as their venture is called, has grown to seven clinics in Bangalore since the first one started in March.

Having raised up to $1.1 million, mainly through angel investors, the two founders have envisaged a massive expansion to open more full-service clinics, which need initial investment of `25-30 lakh and satellites, which need about `50,000 for the furniture and equipment (as the place is leased).

Their plan is to open 20 full-service clinics and 100 satellites in the next two years in Gurgaon and Kolkata, apart from their home base of Bangalore. The new clinics would come up in areas with substantial migrant populations, which often lack the privilege of a family doctor.

“Just like any family doctor, these GPs would have complete history and records of all their patients,” says Rahman, medical director of NationWide.

The doctors believe a model like this takes about five years to reach a substantial scale. In a full-service clinic, the doctors say, the first six months barely see 10-20 patients a day, which, within a year, gradually increases to 30-40 patients a day. “By the fifth year even up to 150 patients can visit per day,” says Chattopadhyay, a gastroenterologist and MD of NationWide.

The founders believe not only will their model help in improving primary healthcare, but it will also provide a great career for GPs, as the venture would also dole out fixed salaries (which they say would be 15-20% higher than industry standards) and a consistent patient pool.

“In India medical students become GPs by default if they fail to get a good post-graduate seat. But the GP’s profession is a key element in medical practice,” says Rahman, a GP himself who took up a KPO job in Bangalore to understand the corporate way of life before starting NationWide.