Eye-Q targets 100 super speciality hospitals by 2012

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The gift of sight is something most of us take for granted, but not this man. Rajat Goel, CEO and Director of super specialty eye hospital Eye-Q, has lined up investments of Rs 240 crore over the next five years. His mission is to set up 30 eye hospitals and 70 affiliated centers through out the country. The first phase of Goel's project has already taken off with five Eye-Q hospitals up and running.

Goel: Entrepreneurship requires a tremendous amount of emotional support. On the management front, it is a challenge to get people to buy in to the idea. Unless and until you have a good team which supports you at the top, people who buy in to your vision, you will not be able to start an organization.

Goel along with his team has so far tied up funds for 20 hospitals, funded by the promoters themselves with a little help from a few high networth individuals with consultation fees varying from Rs 100-400. He claims that EYE-Q offers the best quality standardized eye care at affordable rates. After having tasted success, he is now keen to use the hub-and-spoke model to expand. This means having one super specialty hospital attached to a few others in neighboring places.

Goel: You have a choice of creating a big hospital and attracting patients within a 200-250 km radius, or you can provide those facilities at the place where the patients are and move your machines and experts there. In our hub-and-spoke model, we will have 7-8 hospitals in the span of around 50 km each and these hospitals will be serviced by those machines which we have more or less made portable or fixed in a place so that people can move around and experts control al these hospitals through the doctors there as well as their own personal visits. This way, we are able to leverage both the doctors as well as their equipments because of this hub-and-spoke model. This keeps our pricing appropriate as per what people can afford in the district headquarters.

This IIM Ahmedabad graduate is all set for his game. This year, new projections are set to cross Rs 8 crore and Goel says his best stroke is yet to come. He aims to build 100 hospitals in three-years. Goel is picking up the pace and hitting hard to make sure that he creates an eye care revolution in India.

Goel: We are focusing on district headquarters where the quality of eye care is appalling right now. We are in a space where no big hospitals are willing to go, primarily because big hospitals are right now focusing on only cardiac in other places and bigger cities. First, they would not be interested to go into eye care and second they wouldn't want to go to district headquarters with eye care. So, it may take around five years for people to go there. By that time, we would have done our 100 hospitals.