Dr Devi Shetty
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A biographical sketch
The Times of India Jan 07 2016
Avik Das
Bengaluru
Long before he started Narayana Hrudayalaya, Dr Devi Shetty was a well-known name in the Indian medical world. In 1989, he performed the first neonatal heart surgery in the country , on a 9-day-old baby . He served as the personal physician of Mother Teresa.
In Jan 2016, the Indian stock market gave a thumping cheer to his Bengaluru-based company -which offers cutting edge medical care at a fraction of what it costs elsewhere in the world -by valuing it at more than $1billion.
It was another feather in the cap for the Mangaluruborn cardiac surgeon, who resolved to be a doctor when his fifth-grade teacher told the class that a South African surgeon had just then performed the world's first heart transplant.
He received a Master's degree in surgery from the University of Mysore in 1982 and then trained in cardiac surgery at the Guy's Hospital in England. He returned to India in 1989 to set up the Birlas' cardiac hospital in Kolkata -the B M Birla Heart Research Centre.
“Devi stands out from others because of his passion and commitment towards his profession,“ says Dr Bhujang Shetty , chairman of eye hospital Naraya na Nethralaya and a close re lative of Dr Devi Shetty . “I know Devi from our college days where we used to go for karate and he put his hear and soul into it to become a master,“ he recalled.
Dr Bhujang Shetty said Dr Devi Shetty never wen home during the first 100 sur geries he performed at the Birla hospital, because he be lieved being the senior doc tor he should be available ro und the clock. “He is a per fect team player,“ Dr Shetty said. Dr Devi Shetty later re turned to Karnataka to se up the Manipal Cardiac Centre in Bengaluru. In 2000 he established Narayana Hrudayalaya, a multi-speci ality hospital on the out skirts of Bengaluru, with the vision that healthcare costs could be dramatically lowered by adopting the idea of economies of scale. The heart division is said to be the largest in the world with 1,000 beds and performing over 30 major heart surgeri es a day . This industrializa tion of healthcare prompted the Wall Street Journal to describe Dr Shetty as the Henry Ford of heart surgery
