@docakx .@amitsurg .@drjsrajkumar_ .@JPNadda .@PMOIndia
A hospital in India can take someone who has been blind for years and give them their sight back in six minutes. It costs less than a pizza. And they have done it 6.8 million times.
The hospital is called Aravind. It was started in 1976 by a man named Govindappa Venkataswamy, known as Dr. V. He was 58, had just been forced to retire, and his hands were crippled by arthritis so bad he could barely hold a pen. He had scalpels custom-made for his twisted fingers and still performed over 100,000 eye surgeries in his life.
Two years before he retired, Dr. V walked into a McDonald’s for the first time. He looked at the menu, looked at the assembly line in the back, and came out with an odd idea. He would sell cataract surgeries the way McDonald’s sold burgers.
So he mortgaged his house. His brothers and sisters pooled their life savings. He opened an 11-bed clinic in Madurai. Then he flew to Chicago and enrolled in Hamburger University, the actual McDonald’s training program, to learn how the assembly line worked.
At Aravind, cataract surgery is broken into small steps. Nurses prep one patient while the surgeon operates on another. Each surgeon switches between two tables. The operation itself takes about six minutes.
So far Aravind has seen 55 million patients and done 6.8 million surgeries. More than half of those patients paid nothing. Not a rupee. The ones who can pay subsidize the ones who cannot.
A surgery at Aravind costs between $40 and $125 depending on the lens. In the US, Medicare pays about $1,766 for the same operation. Aravind also has better results. Their complication rate is 1.5%, and serious eye infections happen in about 2 out of every 10,000 surgeries. Most American hospitals are not that good.
They built their own lens factory too, called Aurolab. Imported lenses were costing hundreds of dollars each, so Aurolab makes them for around ten. Today Aurolab produces roughly 10% of the world’s eye lenses and ships to 160 countries.
Every year, Aravind sends doctors and nurses out to rural villages for 2,500 eye camps. They screen people who have been blind for years, bus them to the hospital, operate on them, and bus them back home seeing.
Dr. V died in 2006. His family still runs Aravind. Harvard Business School has been teaching the story as a case study since 1993.
A 58-year-old with crippled hands walked into a McDonald’s. Fifty years later, 6.8 million blind people can see.
.@ARanganathan72 .@prafullaketkar .@RatanSharda55 .@PoornimaNimo
A hospital in India can take someone who has been blind for years and give them their sight back in six minutes. It costs less than a pizza. And they have done it 6.8 million times.
The hospital is called Aravind. It was started in 1976 by a man named Govindappa Venkataswamy, known as Dr. V. He was 58, had just been forced to retire, and his hands were crippled by arthritis so bad he could barely hold a pen. He had scalpels custom-made for his twisted fingers and still performed over 100,000 eye surgeries in his life.
Two years before he retired, Dr. V walked into a McDonald’s for the first time. He looked at the menu, looked at the assembly line in the back, and came out with an odd idea. He would sell cataract surgeries the way McDonald’s sold burgers.
So he mortgaged his house. His brothers and sisters pooled their life savings. He opened an 11-bed clinic in Madurai. Then he flew to Chicago and enrolled in Hamburger University, the actual McDonald’s training program, to learn how the assembly line worked.
At Aravind, cataract surgery is broken into small steps. Nurses prep one patient while the surgeon operates on another. Each surgeon switches between two tables. The operation itself takes about six minutes.
So far Aravind has seen 55 million patients and done 6.8 million surgeries. More than half of those patients paid nothing. Not a rupee. The ones who can pay subsidize the ones who cannot.
A surgery at Aravind costs between $40 and $125 depending on the lens. In the US, Medicare pays about $1,766 for the same operation. Aravind also has better results. Their complication rate is 1.5%, and serious eye infections happen in about 2 out of every 10,000 surgeries. Most American hospitals are not that good.
They built their own lens factory too, called Aurolab. Imported lenses were costing hundreds of dollars each, so Aurolab makes them for around ten. Today Aurolab produces roughly 10% of the world’s eye lenses and ships to 160 countries.
Every year, Aravind sends doctors and nurses out to rural villages for 2,500 eye camps. They screen people who have been blind for years, bus them to the hospital, operate on them, and bus them back home seeing.
Dr. V died in 2006. His family still runs Aravind. Harvard Business School has been teaching the story as a case study since 1993.
A 58-year-old with crippled hands walked into a McDonald’s. Fifty years later, 6.8 million blind people can see.
.@ARanganathan72 .@prafullaketkar .@RatanSharda55 .@PoornimaNimo
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