Without healthcare, the basic tenets of human needs—caring for food, shelter, and clothing—are now incomplete. Furthermore, easy and affordable access to high-quality healthcare must be a guiding principle for our future global healthcare and wellness ecosystem. This ecosystem is made up of numerous aspects such as general medicine, gynaecology, gastroenterology, paediatrics, neurology, urology, and so on.
Health is a multifaceted subject that must be seamlessly integrated into one holistic wellness caring unit infused with advanced technologies to proliferate a patient-centric organic entity of healthcare known as Koshys Hospital––one of India’s best multispecialty hospitals based in North Bengaluru, Karnataka.
A unit of Little Flower Hospital Pvt Ltd, Koshys Hospital was started in 2002, with a mission to provide an unparalleled blend of affordable and quality healthcare through international standards.
Today, under Co-founder Dr Santosh Koshy’s transformational leadership, the group has more than 250 beds in different localities in Bangalore. Koshys Hospital is a 100 bedded multispecialty hospital and is NABH Accredited, providing medical, diagnostic, and surgical services to people across the world.
Mission Infusion of Affordability and Quality
Located in North Bangalore in South India, “Koshys Hospital endeavours to strive constantly to make a positive difference to all our patients with compassion ethically and cost-effectively. We provide 24 x 7 Accident & Emergency Care. Our well-equipped Medical ICU is manned round-the-clock by Anaesthetists, Intensivists, and a well-trained nursing team. We understand the importance and impact of our profession on a person’s life and deliver our services with a smile,” informs Dr Koshy.
Koshys Hospital facilitates a state-of-the-art NICU (Neonatal Intensive Care Unit/Intensive Care Nursery) in Ramamurthy Nagar, Bangalore along with the best child care. Dr Koshy adds that they offer an extensive and well-equipped Level-3 NICU with six beds, complete with the latest monitors, incubators, ventilators, and oscillators. The NICU is staffed by experienced professionals, trained at handling birth-related complications and emergencies 24/7, with a strong focus on becoming one of the best NICU Hospitals in Bangalore. He reveals, “Being the only multispecialty hospital at this location, we believe that nurturing a new-born is critical,” Which is why Koshys Hospital strives to provide the best neonatal critical care, bringing quality and affordable healthcare closer to the Ramamurthy Nagar, Bangalore and also with advanced medical technology and experience at their disposal.
The department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at Koshys Hospital is highly capable of treating all the high-risk pregnancies and most of the health concerns that are specific to women of all ages. The Hospital’s skilled surgeons are experts in the field of minimally invasive surgeries and laparoscopic surgeries. He assures, “Our surgeons work round-the-clock by using new technologies to find out the cause of pain in the pelvic and abdominal regions, examine a tissue mass, confirm endometriosis or pelvic inflammatory disease and look for blockage of the fallopian tubes or for other causes of infertility.”
Our Supreme Care for Your Prime Health
Koshys Hospital is also one of the best hospitals in North Bangalore, India for Orthopaedics. “Our supreme medical expertise has paved the way for better healthcare facilities and services,” says Dr Koshy adding that at Koshy Hospital, they perform orthopaedic surgeries using the most current reconstructive techniques as well as cutting-edge technology and medical equipment to perform bone and joint replacement surgeries.
Dr Koshy, as the visionary nobleman, lends his medical expertise to steer the hospital in the right direction in order to provide continued quality patient care. As a proactive leader, he is a guiding beacon to the entire team at the hospital. As a passionate human being committed to bringing quality health care for all – he founded Koshys Hospital in 2002 and Little Flower Hospital in 1998.
Since its inception, he has brought together some of the finest Doctors across specialties and developed Koshys into a Multi-Specialty Hospital to provide quality healthcare to patients. With over two decades of experience, he is a highly respected paediatrician in the medical fraternity. In the year 1998, he started his journey with Little Flower Hospital which caters to Mother and Child Health. In the year 2002, he inaugurated Koshys Hospital with 30 beds and from then the journey is continuing with 58 bedded hospital in the year 2018 and currently, as a 150 bedded multispecialty hospital that caters to all the specialties as well as all diagnostics under one roof.
Diagrammatic representation of his journey:
Key Differentiating Technovations
Being an experienced leader and sharing his precious opinion on how the adoption of modern technologies like AI and ML is impacting the Healthcare space and how Koshys Hospital is adapting to the change, Dr Koshy says that there are huge challenges for healthcare systems in India in terms of quality, accessibility, affordability, and inequity. On the one hand, India is home to some of the best hospitals in the world, contributing to a growing medical tourism sector (Indo-Asian News Service, 2017). On the other hand, there is an acute shortage of qualified medical professionals. New ML or other AI technologies could help address a number of these challenges, by improving access to quality healthcare, particularly in rural and low-income settings; addressing the uneven ratio of skilled doctors to patients; improving the training and efficiency of doctors and nurses, particularly in complex procedures; and enabling the delivery of personalized healthcare at scale.
The challenge of delivering quality healthcare at scale presents a strong case for developing AI-based solutions for healthcare in India. The deployment of AI is still at a very early stage, particularly in the form of clinical interventions. A number of the identified use cases are still at the development and testing stage. Most of the current use cases take the form of decision support systems, followed by process optimization and virtual assistants. Computer vision––one of the more advanced applications of AI––is being used to train AI algorithms to read X-rays and scans to support the processes of disease detection and diagnosis. Only a small handful of companies are developing surgical simulators, personalized health solutions, and patient monitoring systems.
He expresses, “We, at Koshys Hospital, believe that embracing technology is indispensable as we step into the next era of healthcare. Innovation and adapting the new technologies are going to be the key differentiating factor as these technologies are going to be mainstream in a not-too-distant future, and as healthcare providers, we have to be at the forefront of leading this change and adoption of cutting-edge technologies.”
Treating Challenges with Novel Solutions
Stating the challenges encountered by him and his team in the current industry scenario at Koshys, Dr Koshy says that they include,
~Harnessing Advanced Healthcare Technology:
To harness the potential of healthcare technology in order to transform the health systems and develop a connected healthcare environment, healthcare leaders and clinicians to forge closer ties with medical manufacturers and software application development companies. They can share information and develop new business models and scenarios that can improve the adoption of new technology in healthcare.
~Rising Healthcare Costs:
The cost crisis in healthcare is not new. There are many stakeholders who play a key role in determining the cost of healthcare services, ranging from device manufacturers to medical drug manufacturing companies and payers to insurance policy providers. The rising cost of healthcare directly impacts the revenue of the healthcare companies, as increased cost discourages patients in many ways, from taking lab tests to doing regular follow-ups post-visit, ultimately leading to poor patient outcomes.
~Payment Processing and Invoicing:
A combined effort from healthcare companies, insurance, and benefactors can help curb the rising cost of healthcare and thus help to solve one of the major challenges in healthcare. Healthcare companies can break the whole payment into small chunks to help patients/payers better plan their finances and mode of payment. Again, they can collaborate with medical billing companies to develop healthcare billing systems with powerful features such as a flexible invoice management dashboard, advanced collection, and adjustment, and separate OP and IP billing queue screens can help healthcare providers offer patient-centric solutions and combat healthcare industry challenges more efficiently.
~Pressure on Pharmaceutical Prices:
The rise in pharmacy prescription prices is one of the major healthcare challenges for both healthcare enterprises and patients.
~Healthcare Staffing Shortages:
Many industry groups have predicted a shortage of around 100,000 doctors by 2030. Here, technology can help in many ways such as the use of telehealth. Live streaming, store-and-forward imaging, and remote patient diagnostics can improve access to healthcare even in remote regions.
He furthers that each of the challenges here requires novel solutions to be devised to overcome them. At a high level, streamlining the hospital operations, ensuring the synergy between the various hospital departments, centralizing some operations while still maintaining a sense of autonomy for the key operational areas, and finding opportunities to reduce wastages and duplication of resources goes a long way to increase the efficiency of operations, and reducing duplication and helps conquer a lot of these challenges.
He conveys, “At Koshys we make sure that the patients are provided superlative experience at the hospital which goes a long way in enhancing the patient satisfaction factor. For some challenges, we have to think out of the box to make sure we’re ahead of the technology curve and adapt to the latest technological innovations happening in the healthcare field.”
Patient First Wisdom
In his advice to budding entrepreneurs aspiring to venture into the Healthcare space, Dr Koshy says wisely that there is a multitude of challenges in the healthcare sector and likewise a ton of opportunities to come up with innovative solutions to those problems. Many of these problems are of a scale and require out-of-the-box thinking, which can be solved in numerous unique ways. This field is still nascent with respect to the application of technological solutions in the healthcare sector and this presents budding entrepreneurs with a unique intersection point, wherein they can devise novel techniques to solve the problems in this space.
With the application of the right ideas, there’s enormous scope for these solutions to be scaled quite extensively over the whole healthcare sector across the country. Healthcare technology is evolving rapidly and constantly and entrepreneurs must develop future-proof strategies that will allow them to bring new and valuable concepts, services, and products to the healthcare field. Some of the novel ways are to focus on device integration, necessitated by the rise of telemedicine, embracing patient first mentality, and developing solutions with patients’ needs in mind first.
Future Proof Holistic Healthcare
On envisioning scaling Koshys hospital’s operations and offerings in the future, Dr Koshy shares that they have an extensive roadmap for expansion of our hospital’s operations and offerings to more areas and domains.
He divulges, “We have already established the Departments of ‘Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation’ which includes occupational therapy, speech therapy, geriatric care, palliative care, pulmonary rehabilitation, stroke, and cardiac rehabilitation.”
The Department of ‘Dental and Maxillofacial Surgery’ has been set up with an emphasis on complex maxillofacial surgeries with the involvement of the TM joint. There are plans for future expansion of these departments to cover even more areas of their respective domains.
“Likewise, we have plans for kickstarting the cosmetic surgery department in the hospital, as well as a dedicated fertility centre is planned to be established in the hospital. The cutting-edge field of robotics surgeries is the one to look out for and part of our roadmap to ensure that the hospital is at the forefront of adopting the latest technological innovations in the medical field,” concludes Dr Koshy.
