Foreign Policy Blogs

Business of health

INSEAD recently hosted a conference in Paris on the future of the healthcare industry.  They had a number of interesting speakers, including Harpal Singh of Fortis Healthcare.  Fortis is a leading provider of hospitals in India, and currently the fastest growing.  Their investor presentation provides a look into the future of the business of healthcare (in my opinion).  Every single indicator of financial performance is up, including a 477% increase in net profit over last year Q2.  The cost effectiveness of performing health procedures in India has long been acknowledged through the growth in medical tourism.  But the rapid pace of growth in domestic healthcare is most surprising.  The INSEAD article quotes Singh:

“The total Indian market is currently estimated in healthcare delivery at about 38 billion dollars,” he says. “It is supposed to grow to a 300-billion-dollar market by 2020.” Indeed, with a population of some 1.2 billion people and an average household savings rate of over 30 per cent, India represents a formidable market opportunity. According to government statistics, healthcare is the single largest sector of spending in the Indian economy, and the country’s largest employer.

 

Author

Cynthia Schweer Rayner

Cynthia Schweer Rayner is an independent consultant and philanthropy advisor specializing in public health, social entrepreneurship and scalable business models for positive social change. As a recovering management consultant, she spent several months living in South Africa, and later co-founded the US branch of an organization providing support to orphaned and vulnerable children. In 2009, she was an LGT Venture Philanthropy Fellow, working with mothers2mothers (m2m), a multinational non-profit organization employing mothers living with HIV as peer educators to positive pregnant women. She currently works with individuals, companies and nonprofits to finance and develop models for positive change. Cynthia has an MBA from INSEAD and a BA in English Literature from Georgetown University. She currently lives in Cape Town and visits New York frequently, where she co-owns a Manhattan-based yoga studio, mang'Oh yoga (www.mangohstudio.com).