When Doctors Take Their Mission Beyond Medicine To Bridge Healthcare Gaps

For many medicos, the journey begins with a patient sitting across the desk. But for some, years of watching patients and families struggle to find the right specialist, arrange multiple investigations or travel to another city for treatment eventually raise a larger question: Can the healthcare journey be made simpler, more connected and closer to home?

That question has taken them beyond clinics and operation theatres. They are now building healthcare ventures that bring diagnostics, specialist care, procedures, critical care and follow-up under one roof. Their goal is simple — to make quality healthcare accessible and take it closer to those who need it most.

The Health Outlook traces the journeys of a few such visionaries who have turned their medical careers into a larger medical mission.

For Dr Saket Bansal and Swadeep Srivastava, founder and co-founder and president, respectively, of Pacific OneHealth, this thinking has translated into a micro-hospital model designed to sit between a neighbourhood clinic and a large tertiary-care hospital.

The objective is to provide a broad basket of services in a smaller, more accessible setting so that patients do not have to move from one facility to another for every stage of their care. Dr Bansal describes the Pacific OneHealth model as integrating diagnostics, outpatient care, preventive services, specialist consultations and treatment within a connected ecosystem.

It's Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar facility, for instance, which combines emergency and trauma care, operating theatres, intensive care and advanced diagnostics, along with specialised clinics.

For Dr Bansal the idea is to change the traditional question from “How big is the hospital?” to “How much of the patient's healthcare journey can be managed efficiently in one place?”

He has also been vocal about the need to build a network rather than isolated facilities. Pacific OneHealth has announced plans involving an investment of Rs 300 crore, beginning with five micro-hospitals in Delhi-NCR and subsequently expanding the network nationally. The company has outlined an ambition to scale to 20 facilities over the coming decade, supported by digital health, electronic health records and coordinated referrals.

For General Medicine expert Dr Siddharth Rai too, the inspiration came from a different geography but a similar patient dilemma.

His healthcare journey in Varanasi was shaped by seeing people from Purvanchal travel outside the region for advanced treatment. When Heritage Hospital was established in 1994, the larger ambition was to make world-class medical facilities available to people in Varanasi and surrounding districts under one roof.

As a result, what began as a hospital has grown into a wider healthcare and medical education ecosystem. Heritage’s hospitals bring multiple specialities, advanced diagnostics and emergency care under one roof, making quality treatment more accessible and affordable.

Its diagnostic infrastructure includes advanced imaging and laboratory services, while specialised services have expanded to areas such as kidney transplantation, knee replacement and plastic surgery.

But Rai's expansion vision goes considerably beyond the existing hospital.

The Heritage Institute of Medical Sciences is setting up a 1,000-bed institution, envisaged as a major healthcare and medical education facility for the region, reflecting Rai's larger belief that building healthcare capacity also means building human resources. According to him, a hospital can bring sophisticated equipment to a region, but its long-term impact depends on the availability of trained doctors, nurses, technicians and other healthcare professionals.

The same holds true for Dr Anil Arora, chairman of AVee Multispecialty Hospital in Vaishali, Ghaziabad, whose motivation grew from witnessing patients struggle to navigate fragmented healthcare services.

An orthopaedic surgeon with decades of experience in joint replacement, Dr Arora had seen how a patient's treatment often involved several disconnected stages — consultation, imaging, medical optimisation, surgery, critical care and rehabilitation.

The hospital was therefore conceived around a more integrated experience. Instead of making patients and their families coordinate every element independently, the objective is to bring multiple specialities and supporting services together, enabling doctors to work collaboratively while patients receive diagnosis and treatment within a single healthcare ecosystem.

A similar philosophy runs through the journey of Dr S Chandrakumar, founder and executive chairman of the Kauvery Group of Hospitals, based in South India, who believes in “becoming an excellent doctor before becoming an entrepreneur".

Coming from a small village and training as an anaesthesiologist and critical-care specialist, Dr Chandrakumar witnessed families at some of their most vulnerable moments.

Kauvery Hospitals was established in Tiruchirappalli in 1999 to bring quality tertiary care closer to people in tier-2 and tier-3 cities. Since then, the group has expanded its network and services, including a 200-bed mother-and-child care facility operationalised in 2024.

For Dr Chandrakumar, however, expansion is meaningful only when it improves the patient's experience and outcomes.

A patient with a chronic condition may need a physician, diagnostics, specialist consultation, nutrition advice and follow-up. A surgical patient may require imaging, anaesthesia, surgery, intensive care and rehabilitation. When these services function as a coordinated system, the hospital becomes more than a collection of departments. It becomes a healthcare pathway, he feels.

That is also where the journeys of these doctor-entrepreneurs converge. Clinical expertise may provide the foundation, but running a hospital requires an understanding of technology, quality systems, patient safety, human resources and operations.

For instance, for Dr Srivastava, that means creating a network in which smaller hospitals are not isolated units but connected points of care. For Dr Rai, it means building a regional institution where treatment, education and research reinforce one another, while for Dr Arora, it means reducing the number of steps a patient and family have to take before receiving appropriate care. And for Dr Chandrakumar, good healthcare means medical expertise as well as compassion, dignity and timely access.

Their journeys show that healthcare is not only about treating disease. It is about bringing quality care closer to underserved communities, reducing barriers and ensuring that where a patient resides does not determine the care they receive.