Vision 2020 – Getting Closer, Going Deeper

“There are two institutions that are embedded in the fabric of a society – the place of worship, and the place of healing.”
The Medica Group first established in 2007, committed itself from the get-go to deliver quality healthcare to the people of East India. With 1200-plus beds spread across a current network of 11 tertiary care hospitals in the eastern region, Medica has a Look-East policy and is entirely focused in this region alone. Medica Group today is a key player and a prominent reference source in healthcare management and consultancy. The Group caters to patients not only from the eastern region but also from South-Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries like Bhutan, Nepal, and Bangladesh. We even have patients from Myanmar as well as from far flung African countries.

We are the fastest-growing healthcare chain in eastern India, with hospitals in West and North Bengal, Jharkhand, Assam, Odisha, and Bihar. Tier-II and Tier-III cities are equally adopting preventative healthcare measures like the metro cities. Tier-III cities will soon have more private hospitals as demand is likely to rise there. On the back of the demand, we would like to extend our healthcare services to Tier-II and Tier-III cities. However, we know that setting up a good private hospital in a smaller city is not at all easy, and has its own challenges. The biggest challenge is the delivery model, especially in rural India. Therefore, we would like to grow mostly by strategic brown-field acquisition at the moment. We are planning to expand at places like Bhagalpur, Darbhanga, and Varanasi, among others.

Our next phase of growth relies heavily on leveraging hard-earned trust and, rather than simply diluting our engagement with the community by investing our resources in different geographies, getting closer to the members of the community and digging deep and really planting ourselves in these regions. Besides establishing more centers of excellence, which is our current means of expansion, Medica is looking to do so through two means:

First, we are intent on growing our network of doctors and patients, and developing the infrastructure required to really connect with the community on an authentic level rather than as a unitary referral center of health, many miles away. To this end, we intend to establish community outreach centers in major residential and commercial areas, in and around our current hospitals so that we are able to get closer to our customers, i.e., both the patients who we treat as well as the doctors who entrust their patients’ well-being to us and our team of physicians. This allows us to engage with the communities we serve in a more accessible manner as well as develop closer ties and a means of engaging consistently with our constituencies.

Second, we are collaborating with doctors who have risked everything to bring healthcare to the interiors of the country and each state and serve the people of their hometowns. We recognize the struggle these social entrepreneurs have undertaken and the change they have delivered in their communities. It is with these kindred spirits, who are committed to nurturing and healing their communities, we are keen to elevate their current platforms of healthcare delivery. From working side by side to bringing superspecialist care to their communities, to establishing electronic intensive care units, remotely monitored by trained physicians, we are able to serve the people and the doctors in this community by empowering them with the services and solutions to bring new competencies and enable them to tackle a wider range of disease profiles. Most importantly, it allows them to handle and treat, at least in interim, critical illnesses and other exigent healthcare needs.

2019-20 is an interesting time in the Medica journey. It is a time that we are both trying to expand the reach and capabilities of our current centers of excellence, but get back to basics and as close to the ground as possible, and engage with our customers on a more fundamental basis by going deeper into our communities and engaging with the people actually affecting change, on the ground.