Health for All

Walking a tight rope balancing profits and philanthropy, LifeSpring Hospital, Hyderabad, is one unique venture that is trying to fill the void left by the competitive private sector and the public healthcare system. In fact, LifeSpring’s mission grew out of this deep deficiency to address the needs of lower income households of the society, where the expenses incurred on health have a life changing effect. It provides low cost, high quality maternity hospitals, for low income women. LifeSpring Hospitals launched as a separate private company with equity paticipation from HLL Lifecare. and Acumen Fund in February 2008. Today LifeSpring Hospitals network has grown to become the largest private maternity hospital network in India and aspires to become one of the largest in the world. Low-income women want and deserve safe, affordable maternal care which is provided by LifeSpring Hospitals, and the company has managed to put dignity at the centre of this endeavour.

LifeSpring’s business model is one-of-its-kind; it aims to serve as a model for providing high-quality maternal and child health services to the poor in India as well as worldwide. It has wisely chosen an unserviced customer group and high prevalence need – pregnancy – to base its business on. The hospital focusses on a particular niche of maternal health and achieves high quality within that niche through its process-oriented methods. This is its most important differentiator, and has contributed immensely to its success. Anant Kumar, CEO, Lifespring Hospital speaks to Neelam Mickey Kachhap about the group

Please tell us briefly about LifeSpring? What are your primary goals?

LifeSpring Hospitals (LifeSpring) is a growing chain of maternity hospitals providing affordable, high-quality healthcare to lower–income women in India. Through its network of medium-sized (20-25 beds) hospitals, its goal is to provide safe, clean, and affordable maternity services.

By increasing access to high-quality healthcare, LifeSpring encourages women to take advantage of the health benefits associated with institutional delivery and maternity care, which contributes to a reduction in the rate of maternal mortality/morbidity in India. With its modern medical facilities and strong customer-focused healthcare, LifeSpring treats lower-income women and their families with dignity and respect.

What is the rationale behind launching this company?

Women are the most vulnerable sections of our society. More than 100,000 women die in India every year from pregnancy-related causes and an equal number suffer moderate to severe morbidities. The high level of maternal mortality is distressing because majority of these deaths can be averted (with proper maternal care or effective referral). In terms of its impact, poor health has repercussions not only for the woman but also for her entire family.

Women with poor health status are more likely to give birth to low birth weight infants, less likely to be able to feed and care adequately for their children and are less capable of pursuing gainful social, economic or community related activities. Understanding the centrality of a woman's health to her household's well being and also supporting the household to care for their children is the essence of LifeSpring's work.

Prior to LifeSpring Hospitals, low-income women had few options when the time came to deliver their baby, as the cost of traditional private hospitals remains out of reach of many Indians. Yet, public hospitals’ free services often compromise quality, transparency, efficiency, and attitude towards the customers.

Women are increasingly choosing to give birth at a private hospital, but often have to take out loans or sell assets to finance their choice of receiving adequate care. LifeSpring was started to address this deep deficiency and in response to women’s demand for an alternative option.

What was the source of funding for the company? Please tell us about your present investors.

LifeSpring is jointly promoted by Hindustan Lifecare (HLL), a Miniratna enterprise under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare of the Government of India, and Acumen Fund, a nonprofit venture philanthropy fund which invests in social enterprises that address poverty.

The company is a 50/50 equity partnership between HLL and Acumen Fund. It is incorporated in Trivandrum and headquartered in Hyderabad.

Please tell us about the company's growth over the years. What is the present scale of the company?

In 2005, we opened the first LifeSpring Hospital in Moula Ali, a suburb of Hyderabad. The concept was simple: provide women with a high-quality care including pre- and post-natal services, deliveries, family planning services, medical termination of pregnancy, infant care (including immunisations), diagnostic services, and pharmacy services reasonably priced at 50 to 70 pe cent lower than private clinics.

The hospital was small, with just 20 beds, but the community embraced the clinic. Within 18 months of opening its doors, the hospital broke even. Three years however, after the launch of the first hospital, LifeSpring Hospitals began its rapid expansion to other neighbourhoods surrounding the city of Hyderabad. By 2011, the chain had grown to 12 hospitals located in high-density, low-income areas.

What are the challenges faced by you? How do you overcome the challenges?

Challenge No. 1: Sharing and nurturing the LifeSpring value system across our growing organisation.

In this rapid ramp-up, our excellent HR team is selecting new employees who espouse our values and training them thoroughly. But, each one of us must make it our personal responsibility to ensure our value system, based on respect and accountability, penetrates every layer of all our hospitals.

Challenge No. 2: Maintaining customer service excellence across all our hospitals.

To meet this challenge, our marketing and CRM team has developed excellent customer service modules, including videos to train our new staff on our protocols. We also designed a system to collect customer feedback digitally and are developing a customer service benchmarking study to compare our hospital services against those of other hospitals and hospitality companies in India and the US.

Challenge No. 3: Maintaining high quality care at all our hospitals.

LifeSpring is proud to have standardised protocol in all hospitals. The challenge is replicating these quality standards at the new hospitals, and our quality assurance team is doing a fantastic job of ensuring exactly that.

I always look at challenge as learning opportunity and solving them key part my job. My six point strategy to address challenges are:

• Believe that it can be overcome
• Know the facts and not work on just work on prior assumptions
• Change the perspective, the challenge looks very different, depending on the vantage point that we look at it.
• Get smart people to work on the challenge.
• Look for ideas from other business outside the health sector as well
• Finally, never give up

Please tell us about your future plans. Where do you see the company in the next five years.

We plan to expand the chain through out India. In next 3-5 years time, we are planning to take the chain to 100 hospitals.

mneelam.kachhap@expressindia.com