The 10 Most Influential Multispeciality Hospitals The 10 Most Influential Multispecialty Hospital Sm | Page 16

1. What was your inspiration behind starting HCG?
What has been the journey of HCG since then?
I always had the vision to make a difference in the
country through my work. In this regard, I went to
the US for higher studies and was fortunate to be
enrolled for a residency fellowship at the MD
Anderson Cancer Center. That is where I learned the
ropes of setting up a cancer center and developing
partnerships. I started the Bangalore Institute of
Oncology (BIO) which was the first private
initiative in cancer care. Exploring how oncology
shaped in the country, the needs and areas of
technological gap and affordability, I put together
the hub-and-spoke model for developing HealthCare
Global Enterprises Limited (HCG). Since then we
have made a huge paradigm shift in cancer care
across the country. Presently, we have 26 centers
pan India.
2. What are the main services that HCG provides?
How have they benefitted your patients? Major
contributing factors contributed to this success?
HCG has been at the forefront of the fight against
cancer. We have a multidisciplinary team of
specialists with expertise in specific fields of cancer
care. We provide all the treatment modalities like
radiation, surgical and medical oncology, under a
single roof, which gives us an edge when it comes to
customizing treatment options, based on every case.
We believe that we must change how we treat cancer
and research is the first step to help us do that. We
can cite many examples of patients who have
benefited from the application of genomics research
to their treatment. Instead of a “hit and miss”
approach that some doctors use, I look forward to the
day when across India, oncologists have the
knowledge and technical expertise to treat cancer the
right way, the first time. That is my onco-philosophy,
and that is how we treat cancer at HCG. It is
genomics – an understanding of the genome of a
cancer cell and the use of that knowledge to choose
the treatment that allows us to have a personalized
approach to cancer medicine. Our Hub-and-Spoke
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model helps us to maintain an integrated approach to
cancer care. With our spokes located in Tier 2 and 3
cities, we are successfully able to make the care
easily accessible to the patients across the country.
Our center of excellence in Bangalore serves as the
hub providing access to centralized quality control
and assurance services, establishing treatment
protocols across the network, providing centralized
treatment planning, and tele radiology services, and
providing access to advanced technologies and
specialized procedures.
3. Amongst so many competitors, how has HCG
stood tall and differentiated itself from others, all
these years?
There were cancer centers run by the governments or
trust hospitals and multispecialty hospitals with
cancer wing. HCG came in as a private enterprise
focusing on hi-end oncology care. By bringing in
hub-and-spoke model, creating multiple centers
across the country, we made cancer care accessible,
affordable and treated the ‘right way first’ with
high-quality treatment in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. We
have made advanced cancer care a reality for
millions of people across the country. And that’s
what makes us different from others. Our
value-based medicine - chosen as a case study by the
Harvard Business Review and the World Bank - has
been able to bring down the cost of cancer treatment
to almost a tenth of global prices in some cases while
achieving the same outcomes.
4. Kindly tell us in detail about the transplant
services that you provide. How have these helped
your patients and the industry?
HCG offers Liver and Bone marrow transplant
services. We are the first in Asia to do a bloodless
bone marrow transplant for an American
60-year-old patient suffering from Non-Hodgkins
Lymphoma of mantle cell type in the bone marrow.
The patient was not keen on undergoing a blood
transfusion. After having undergone chemotherapy at
New York, he came for a consultation at HCG as no