Can perform 60 heart operations in a day: Narayana Health

Narayana Hrudayalaya, which operates a chain of multi-specialty and super-specialty hospitals under the Narayana Health brand, has received approval from the capital markets regulator Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) to float an initial public offering (IPO).In an interview to CNBC-TV18, Dr Devi Shetty, founder, Narayana Health, shares his views on the company's upcoming IPO. Below is the edited transcript of the interview. Q: Your views on affordable healthcare.A: I think we will be much better off now, because affordable healthcare requires a huge capital requirement. We have to add a number of beds, thousands and thousands of beds. That cannot be organised as a privately held company. So now with that we are becoming a listed company, we will have access to fairly large quantity of capital for building large number of hospitals. So, we are in a much better condition now compared to what we were before.Q: Also if you could just throw some light on how will you be able to sustain the margins going ahead? Because we are seeing from one side a spike in inflation; I know that you have a business model that can afford this kind of low healthcare service providing, but will there be any change in the strategy going ahead?A: There will not be any change in the strategy, but you have to realise that the country is at the moment serving a tiny percentage of the people who need the services. Like I said in the beginning, we need to do 20 lakh heart operations a year in the country. Today all heart hospitals put together perform 1.2 lakh heart surgeries. So, there is a great need, and if you look at our own hospital where I am operating, there is a health city in Bangalore, we do between 25-32 heart surgeries a day, but we can easily go up to 60 heart operations in a day. So, those additional number of surgeries will happen when more people access healthcare, then the cost of offering that service will be much less at much lesser price compared to what it will cost us to build similar facility.