The billionaire surgeon who says he can solve the UK’s healthcare crisis
Dr Devi Shetty, who brought affordable private healthcare to the masses in India, believes cutting-edge technology can save the NHS
You might not have heard of Dr Devi Shetty, the billionaire philanthropist and cardiovascular surgeon who cared for Mother Theresa in her final years. But his vision for transforming Britain’s healthcare system is bold and controversial. Having already revolutionized private healthcare in India, he believes he can do the same for the NHS.
"I am convinced the NHS is one of the few systems in the world that can truly transform itself," he says. "The pieces are there – the expertise, the workforce, the trust, it’s a single payer on a national scale. It just needs to be put together."
We meet on the 29th floor of Guy’s Hospital, where the view has changed dramatically since Dr Shetty first arrived in London as a young surgeon. "This place made me," he says, "Everything good in my life happened because of the NHS."
Dr Shetty is now the founder of one of India’s largest hospital networks, Narayana Health, which has expanded into the Caribbean and recently acquired Practice Plus Group hospitals in the UK. The independent hospital chain already treats high volumes of NHS patients at no additional cost, while offering streamlined, affordable private care through its Wellsoon service, aimed at ordinary workers.
Far from joining the chorus declaring the NHS "broken," Dr Shetty believes the service can be fixed. And the besuited 72-year-old believes he is the man to do it. "Making healthcare accessible to all," he says, "is my life’s mission."
Dr Shetty, the eighth of nine children, grew up in India’s Karnataka district. While his family was wealthy, his parents suffered from chronic illnesses. "To a child in that situation, doctors are saviours," he says. "I wanted to save lives too."
After studying medicine in India, he moved to Britain in his early 30s. "India then had no such training," he says. "My teachers, mostly products of the NHS, said ‘go to England.’" He worked at Killingbeck Hospital in Leeds, then the Royal Brompton in London before moving to Guy’s Hospital, which was "doing 600 heart surgeries a year."
"It was the best training anyone could hope for," he says. But ultimately, he returned to India. "My country needed me more. I wouldn’t have made much difference in the UK. I wanted to take back not just skill, but a philosophy."
A life-changing phone call
In the early 1990s, Dr Shetty returned to Calcutta, where he carved out a reputation as one of the country’s finest medical talents. "I was performing the country’s first neonatal heart surgery on a 21-day-old baby," he says. "And I was asked to build a centre of excellence in cardiac surgery."
A workaholic by nature, he would get into trouble for operating out of hours instead of turning patients away. So in 1992, while elbow-deep in a patient’s chest cavity, he received the phone call that would change his life. "The anaesthetist took the call," he admits. "I remember feeling slightly irritated that I was being interrupted. They wanted to know if I could make a home visit. I laughed. I operate in hospital theatres, under sterile conditions, not homes. But the caller had insisted it might ‘change my life.’ I was intrigued."
The mysterious new patient was Nobel Peace Prize winner Mother Teresa. "She’d had a heart attack but was keen for it not to be public knowledge," he recalls. Dr Shetty cared for her for the final five years of her life, and she often accompanied him on his rounds. "She completely changed my attitude towards my profession, and society," he says. "As doctors, we see everyone as flesh and blood, but working with her was like watching God in human form, yet she was strangely unaware of her power. Presidents of many countries called the hospital daily, but she never believed she was famous. She believed in simplicity, and helping the masses."
Introducing economies of scale
When Dr Shetty opened his flagship hospital, Narayana Institute of Cardiac Sciences, in Bangalore in 2000, the core NHS principle of healthcare accessible to everyone was firmly in his vision. "I couldn’t replicate the NHS fully in India," he says, "but I wanted that spirit."
An innate business sense made him realize that the cost of healthcare could potentially be halved if hospitals scaled up the number of treatments they perform. "When I left England 36 years ago, my first bypass patient in India paid about $1,500," he says. "Today, that cost is still the same – yet in America it would cost more like $70,000. We use the same machines they do in America, the difference is the economy of scale and the technology platform we built."
On the morning we meet, he enthusiastically shows me the operating list from Narayana. There are 36 heart surgeries scheduled, in one hospital, in one day. "By comparison," he adds, "the whole of England – all NHS centres combined – will do around 65 to 70 heart surgeries today."
A CT scanner that performs 20-40 scans a day in many Western hospitals, he says, can easily do 250 in China or 500 in Turkey. Operating theatres, often used for just a few hours a day in the West, can run safely for 16 hours with the right processes. "If a solution isn’t affordable, it is not a solution," he says.
Dr Shetty’s ideas quickly extend beyond hospitals. More than two decades ago, the Indian state of Karnataka suffered a brutal drought. Farmers couldn’t pay for healthcare, hospitals sat underused. He proposed an audacious solution: insure farmers for 11 cents a month. Four million joined in the first year. Over 12 years, 1.3 million surgeries were performed through the program – including 130,000 cardiac procedures. "We believed farmers could afford 11 cents," he says. "If they skip smoking for one day, they have the money."
The digital platform he believes will reshape global healthcare
Much of Dr Shetty’s renewed focus on Britain stems from the technology his organization has spent more than two decades building: a mobile-first hospital platform powered by real-time AI, developed by 250 software engineers at a cost exceeding $100m. It increases productivity, efficiency, and safety so that higher numbers of patients can be treated, and more cost-effectively, all thanks to economies of scale. "Medical error is the third leading cause of death in the US," he says, explaining that a deadly lab result might return at 6pm but go unseen until the next morning. In his hospitals, every test result, every imaging report, every ICU change appears instantly on a doctor’s mobile phone – not a desktop terminal used only a few times a day. "Global healthcare will run on mobile phones," he says. "Not desktops."
An integrated AI system reviews more than 70 pieces of data per patient and even suggests required interventions. "It is like a brilliant doctor standing behind every bed," he says. The system is already running in India, Kenya, and other regions. Dr Shetty’s teams are now preparing it for GDPR compliance, with the intention of rolling it out imminently across the UK to achieve dramatically higher productivity and reduce healthcare costs for both the NHS and those seeking to pay for private treatment.
Despite being in his 70s, he has no plans to retire, still seeing up to 80 cardiac patients a day and performing surgery most days. "It gives me joy," he says. "There’s a secret language between the heart and the heart surgeon. I don’t mind if nobody remembers me after I die, I only want to see a world where everyone has access to healthcare. I know this can actually happen in my lifetime."
