I was doing my super specialization in a very big hospital in Delhi and
a lot of my friends and family used to call me saying that somebody had a heart
attack or somebody is an accident, somebody is very sick and
they're bringing that patient to Delhi and could I help them in any way.
And sometimes they would never turn up, I will keep waiting for them and
then when I finally would get to contact them in the morning,
I would get to know that the patient had died on the way so
they had to turn back and go back to their villages.
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I'm Shuchin Bajaj, I am the founder director of Cygnus Group of Hospitals.
We are a chain of hospitals that provides emergency, tertiary critical care to
communities that do not yet have access to these services and
especially in conditions where the golden hour is of great importance.
Where you can actually lose your life if you spend too much time on the road while
trying to get to the nearest big city that has this services.
We have ten of these hospitals, seven in Haryana and three in outskirts of Delhi.
And we are planning to open another 15 more hospitals in the next five years.
Cygnus is committed to ethically saving lives with dignity,
affordability and quality.
It is actually a fireable offense in our company if we turn away any patient due to
financial considerations.
So we will treat all patients regardless of
the fact that they're able to pay, or not.
My initial budget would be, okay,
this month I can buy a glucometer because that is 1,200 rupees so I'll buy it.
And nebulizer is 1,500 rupees so I can't afford it so I'll buy it next month.
This is how we started with our hospitals and
started off with one very small one then luckily good people joined on the way,
we got good backing from people who put their money behind our efforts.
Right now we have about 1,600 people working for us across our 10 hospitals and
our offices and we've created more than 2 billion patients to now, and
we've done more than 50,000 life saving surgeries.
That is some numbers that we're really proud of.
Unfortunately, the thing that we do is to show the critical care.
The preventive part of it gets lost somehow the bandwidth that we have.
So it's very important to go to the grassroots and the community and
talk to them about prevention, about how to have a healthy lifestyle.
This is the reason we lay a lot of emphasis on our camps and
on our preventive checkups and on our outreach programs on patient education.
We are having on an average 40 camps across locations every week.
It can be anywhere just a preventive checkup camp where we usually do the blood
sugar, the ECG and counseling of the patients and surprisingly, we detect
five to ten new diabetics every day who had no idea that they were diabetics.
They found out about Cyg on the Internet when I was very,
very surprised that it is such an intensive program where they come and
work with the companies too much and it's highly individualized.
We realized with the help of the Cyg facilitators that at least 25 or
ideally 50 hospitals or something up that Cygnus should look at
because the need is so immense see that started working on our value chains.
What exactly was that we were not doing right.
We've learned a lot about sales and marketing as well.
Still the course is continuing, and we are learning newer and newer things.
Some people say that if you try to travel on two boats, you will definitely sink.
So you should choose which boat you need to be in.
So either you become an entrepreneur or you stay a doctor.
But I feel that if I stop being the doctor that I am and
stop being clinically involved with patients
then I will not really understand the need of the patients.
I'll be just looking at the hospitals from 30,000 feet level.
So you have to go down to the grassroots, see the patient and talk to them.
The best I feel is when some of my patients get well and have a smile on
their faces and it's much better than any other numbers on Excel sheets or
any reports that I can produce.
Is all due to all the friends and the investors and the backers and
the doctors that are with us that the team that has kept the belief in spite of
all these ups and downs and the struggles that we face on a daily basis.
But it's been something that I would do over and over again, if I get the chance.
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