Day 4: I can see clearly now… 12/27/13

Day 4: I can see clearly now…

Friday

            We met the Hardy’s in the hotel at 430am. Outside there was a bus waiting for us. We were headed on a plane flight. We were leaving Mumbai. I felt satisfied about what we had done here. Not only had we seen every single tourist attraction in Mumbai but we had also gotten a great image of who lives here. The people were familiar to us. To go from Portland to Mumbai was a shocker, but now India seems much more known.

            Today we were going to Madurai. Madurai is way in the south of India. The flight from Mumbai to Madurai takes about 3 and a half hours. Not many tourists go to Madurai. Our sole purpose here was to visit an Optimaligy facility. See, my Dad is a Doctor who has gone into to business side of healthcare. He is fascinated by innovation and learning techniques by people who are “doing it right.” Heather Hardy works for the company that my Dad owns called ZoomCare. Heather is the Director of Expansion and leads the role out of new markets.

Aravind, the eye clinic, is one of the most innovative places in the whole world. The care that they give is extremely quality care. Each visit has a 98% success rate. They deliver this care with a swinging scale. This means that the people who visit Aravind get to choose what they wish to pay. If you feel like you can’t pay, then you still receive the same quality care as a patient (I will get into that later).

Not only does Aravind provide high quality care a price range that fits your life style but they do so at a massive scale. The Madurai Hospital on Wednesday saw 3000 people. One day, three thousand people. How are they able to do this? READ ON:

We grabbed some lunch at a downtown hotel before meeting someone at the Aravind facility at 11am. Before we went inside the training facility where we were to meet the people from Aravind we had a chance just to see the campus from the outside. I say the word campus deriblitly. In a matter of two or three blocks there were about 5 buildings all about 15-20 stories high. There was an outpatient building. There was an inpatient building. There was a research facility. There was a training facility. There was an emergency eye clinic. There were probably more clinics in the area that I couldn’t name.

The person that was presenting to us about Aravind was related to the man who started the idea of Aravind.

Dr. V grew up wanting to be an obstetrician but he had a growth problem in his hands. This made it so that he was not able to deliver babies. So-seeing the amount of blindness that was plaguing the people-started an optimoligy clinic to treat the 12 million blind in India. 80% of this is needless or curable blindness.

Aravind started out in the year ______ . They had 11 beds. Now they have a hundred times that in one hospital. 60% of the care they give is cataracts. Cataracts are caused by a problem in the persons DNA. People today don’t fully understand what causes cataracts. The lenses get cloudy and this is a cataract. Since people to not know what creates a cataract at a DNA level, we cannot sure cataracts. But we can fix a cataract. This is called a cataract surgery. We saw a video of a hospital team in Aravind giving a patients this surgery.

HERE IS HOW THE SURGERY WENT DOWN:

            Each bed has a surgeon and two nurses (I will tell you more about the nurses later)

            The patient lies on the bed, droplets of anesthesia in their eye making it so they can’t feel anything

            Over the bed is a mechanical arm. This arm holds everything that a surgeon will need in their surgery

            The surgery starts by the surgeon taking the knife and making a small incision in the bottom of the eye

            Then the surgeon inserts a knife into the surface of the eye, splitting up the cloudy cornea

            The surgeon takes a suction tool and sucks up the cloudy cataract.

            Once the cloudy cataract is out of the eye, the surgeon expands the incision in the under of the eye

            Through the base of the eye, the surgeon places a brand new cataract made of plastic

            Once the new lense is in the eye, the surgeon sews up the incision by burning the two cut parts of the eye together creating a coteries

            Then the arm moves rotates to the next bed and the nurse prepares the surgeon for the next surgery

            The whole proseger lasts about 5 minutes

            The ‘nurse’ is an extremely interesting job in Aravind Eye system. This position-held by all and only women-is a starting point for many careers. Those who start out as nurses have the potential to move up the ranks to a clinical manager or even a lead manager. The nurses are hired regardless of their schooling or smarts. When I asked how they are hired or why they are hired I was told that people in Aravind are hired because of their attitude and work ethic. Sometimes people distinguish going to school with being a productive person in a company-that is, you have to go to college in order to be hirable. But the fact is that there is no correlation between these two things. This means that one does not need to go o college in order to be smart.

            Now I am able to answer your question. How is Aravind able to care for thousands of people each day for very little money?

            Aravind’s lead innovation is that in order to care for many at little cost you have to create your own ecosystem. The replacement lenses cost almost thirty bucks a piece. So you have to make your own lenses. So Aravind has a factory where they manufacture every single replacement lenses they needed for a fereaction of the price of a western lens.

            We visited the factory where they manufacture the lenses. Here is what we saw:

            We started out by putting on bunny suits (for the sanity of the factory. Through the windows we could see the factory worker busily spinning wires for suters, cutting rings of plastic to make the suitable size of the lens. Every window we saw, thirty workers would stop working and look at us. Some of them would wave, others would try to crack a smile behind the masks that they were wearing. Only a few of the people in the factory ignored us. It was striking having 30 people just staring at you. Every window we looked through we were met by looks from the factory workers.

            The extent of the factory was incredible. Each tool that was being used must have cost a seruis amount of money. But the way that Aravind pays for these machines I still don’t understand. They have a 25% margin on their goods and most of their visits are free!!!

            Tonight’s dinner was delicious. Served on banana leaves, the restaurant had no forks and only two dishes. 30 items for 9 people cost roughly 18 bucks.