Tag: Viren Shetty

Coronavirus scare: Need to follow self-regulation to a large extent, says Sudarshan Ballal of Manipal Hospitals

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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The deadly novel coronavirus continues to wreak havoc across the country and the globe. There are 73 confirmed cases of covid-19 in India and 4 patients have recovered.

Viren Shetty, Executive Director and Group COO of Narayana Health said, “One of the first things that we have noticed in our hospital is that the minute any time a patient comes in with coughing symptoms or any sort of suspected case, immediately there is a panic situation that happens in our hospital at the emergency room, among the nurses, among the doctors because this disease is highly infectious.”

Talking about how the spread of COVID-19 be prevented, he said, “It is simple, it is what they were doing a 100 and even a 1000 years ago. Just isolate yourself. People should stay at home, avoid large gatherings, avoid travel, wash your hands frequently, don’t go to the temple, don’t go to the factory, don’t go to the department store, theater, shopping mall. You stay at home and you will be fine.”

“We have done as much as we can and I commend the government in all that they have enabled to do so far, but this is beyond the scope of that. What we are trying to do is limit the spread of infection,” he added.

Sudarshan Ballal, Chairman of Manipal Hospitals said that currently there have not been many cases of COVID-19 in their hospital. “However, looking at the trends all over the world, this could be a temporary lull before the storm. So, we have to be mentally prepared for a large number of patients coming in even though the numbers coming in so far are quite low,” he said.

Ballal further added that citizens play a major role, in addition to what the government is doing. “There has to be self-regulation to a large extent. I think this is a time where there is a lot of virus floating around and so we have to be careful about whom we meet, where we travel and common sense measures like anyone who has a cold and cough should not get into the public space like movie theatres, malls, so on and so forth,” he said.

Speaking about the shortage of masks, he said, “As far as masks are concerned, the biggest problem is misuse and hoarding of masks. You see a large number of people walking the streets of Bangalore or any other city with masks when they do not need one. The indication for a mask is very clear, care givers who are taking care of patients who have respiratory illnesses, people who have cold, cough, runny nose so on and so forth and also maybe if you are going into a large public space where you do not know what kind of people are there. But it is not for the general use and I think this hoarding has to stop.”

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KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Limit contact, wash hands, but no masks: Coronavirus advice from Narayana Health’s Viren Shetty

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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“Limit contact, wash your hands, try and stay at home,” advises Viren Shetty, executive director and group COO of Narayana Health, on ways to combat the threat of coronavirus. “I would very strongly recommend people not to buy caps, masks and gloves,” he added, labelling the adoption of such measures as ineffective.

“To be fair we are not prepared for most things in this country. However, we have isolation wards spread out across most of hospitals, government medical colleges, private medical colleges and all of these have made themselves available to the government,” said Shetty in an interview with CNBC-TV18.

“Should it come to that, we have capacity to deal with the patients in a limited case, but should it come to the issue of a massive epidemic any health system across the world would be under tremendous amount of strain,” he added.

On directions from the government and health authorities with regards to combating the threat of coronavirus, he said, “The protocol for this is standard — as and when patient shows up and with suspected cases of COVID-19, we would isolate them, take their samples while keeping them in isolation, send the samples to the Rajiv Gandhi Institute of Chest Diseases. If it comes back positive then we immediately send them into further isolation in one of the government approved facilities or if not, we send them back home and advise them to quarantine themselves at home.”

About immediate public health steps, Shetty said, “The most important thing that anyone can do right now is to pressure your local neta (political representative) to allot more money for healthcare. The fact is that even in the best of times we are barely able to manage with the current health facility that we have.

“Limit contact, wash your hands, try and stay at home. If you have a cold, don’t be a hero and minimise all international travel as much as possible,” he added.

Debunking myths about coronavirus, Shetty said that intense summer heat in India won’t be a protection against the coronavirus.

“The fact is Singapore and Thailand, which are countries as hot as India, have seen an outbreak as well as countries like West Africa. So I wouldn’t say heat is going to protect us.

“The most plausible explanation for why it has taken a long time for the virus to catch up in India is because our supply chain is almost decoupled from China. So we don’t have close economic links with China that has caused earlier transmission in those other countries, but if I were to debunk a couple of other myths, I would very strongly recommend people not to buy caps, masks and gloves.

“The fact is hospitals need these for their health workers. There is a huge shortage in the market, there is a lot of stockpiling, it is raising the cost for hospitals who need these equipment to do the day-to-day and we are not able to get that,” Shetty added.

On the progress in combating coronavirus Shetty said that effective treatment is still some distance away.

“In China and United States there are a lot of trials going on and they managed to isolate a few genetic markers for this but the fact is we are far from identifying any effective treatments.

“A lot of plants in China have been shut down and so a lot of the active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) that the Indian drug industry depend on have been disrupted and so a drug that we depend on an anti-coagulant called Heparin, which we require for surgery has become hard to come by and the cost to import this has gone up at least three times.”

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KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Massive shift happening for “economics of hospitals” in India, says Narayana Health

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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There is a massive shift happening for the “economics of hospitals” in India, said Viren Shetty, executive director and group COO, Narayana Health. “We are seeing that there is going to be a lot more price control not just in drugs, in consumables but also across margin control for every input cost of ours,” he said in an interview with CNBC-TV18.

CNBC-TV18’s ‘Riders in the Storm’ identifies companies that are bucking the slowdown trend and Narayana Health is the company that is weathering the storm in the healthcare sector.

“Fortunately, our numbers have been looking good and the year does look quite positive for us. There does exist seasonal variations. Generally, Q3 is a depressed quarter for most healthcare companies given that it coincides with both Diwali and Eid but we believe it will pick up in Q4. So we are quite positive for the rest of the year,” said Shetty.

“For the next year at least, we aren’t looking at expanding any more. We recently commissioned three hospitals, two in Delhi and one in Bombay. We have enough latent capacity within the group. We have 6,000 operational beds but we also have 7,000 capacity beds. So a lot of our efforts will go towards operationalising those beds,” Shetty added.

However, he did not rule out the expansion plans going forward.

On the expansion front, he said, “We are taking this pause to look at our operations and focus a lot more on additional transformation so that we are able to run things more efficiently within the existing infrastructure. Once we feel confident that this is something that is replicable is when we would be more confident about scaling because, at this point, a greenfield hospital simply is not able to generate an adequate return on capital.”

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Thursday’s filing dispelled some doubts, though Musk still has work to do. He and his advisers will spend the coming days vetting potential investors for the equity portion of his offer, according to people familiar with the matter

KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow

Narayana Hrudayalaya’s double-digit growth is sustainable, says COO Viren Shetty

KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)

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Narayana Hrudayalaya, a multi-speciality hospital chain, reported a whopping 279 percent year-on-year jump in profit while revenue increased 18.3 percent in the quarter ended March 2019.

Kesavan Venugopalan, CFO and Viren Shetty, ED & group COO of Narayana Hrudayalaya, spoke to CNBC-TV18 about the company’s financial results and growth outlook.

Shetty said that they believe double-digit growth is sustainable for the year going forward.

“The 3 oldest hospitals in our network; the 2 in Bengaluru and 1 in Kolkata have consistently been growing but the big swing that is noticed is our big range hospitals; our hospital in Ahmedabad, Raipur, Shimoga have swung from negative into positive territory and that is contributed to the biggest change to EBITDA,” Shetty said.

On the average revenue per bed, Venugopalan said, “Price revision is the last lever which we apply in Narayana Hrudayalaya. So to that extent, the average revenue per occupied bed (ARPOB) will follow the inflationary trend what we could see in the market. Otherwise, we derive our ARPOB increases purely by speciality mix and other categories mix which we tend to influence in a positive manner.”

On the debt front, he said, “Our current net debt is around Rs 713 crore. We were at around Rs 768 crore net debt in FY18. Last year there was a spurt because of our acquisition of Cayman, the other shareholding which we acquired. We see that the borrowing increase will happen in a very narrow range and we expect that there might be a very narrow range increase with respect to borrowing for at least FY20.”

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KV Prasad Journo follow politics, process in Parliament and US Congress. Former Congressional APSA-Fulbright Fellow