Ms. Kanchan Naikawadi, Director, Indus Health Plus
Interviewed By: Sandeep Kshatriya, Facilitator, The CEO Insights
The CEO Insights: In India with the growing incidence of lifestyle diseases, how important is preventive health check- ups?
Kanchan Naikawadi: The adage “Prevention Is Better than Cure” holds so true when it comes to diseases and their adverse consequences on our lives. We must understand that prevention is imperative and should be an ideal preference over late detection of disease and going for an extensive treatment ordeal.
Putting the onus on today’s modern lifestyle, periodic and regular preventive health checkups are a boon in early detection of diseases. Diabetes, obesity, hypertension, high cholesterol, heart diseases, certain cancers and more of such ailments come as freebees with today’s erratic lifestyle. Unfortunately these do not exhibit pronounced symptoms until they become a full blown disease. All these diseases are fairly debilitating, can seriously impair normal life, and if left untreated may lead to devastating complications.
Providentially, these diseases can be easily prevented and even completely cured if detected early on time.
The CEO Insights: Before starting Indus Health Plus, what all business ideas you had and how you narrowed down the options?
Kanchan Naikawadi: Getting into prevention as a business was fairly coincidental and was not a planned move. When I lost my father due to late detection of an advanced cancer, it struck me real hard that maybe we could have saved him if we got to know of it early. That huge blow in my life impelled me to take a step further and create awareness in the society about this still less provoked concept of – Prevention.
The CEO Insights: Your experiences with Indus Health Plus and your role in the organization?
Kanchan Naikawadi: Indus is my baby and I have had wonderful experiences and moments since its inception. I have nurtured it for more than 12 years and as a Director of the organisation, I feel immense proud to see it flourishing so well.
The CEO Insights: How does it feel being the first Indian female entrepreneur in the preventive healthcare space to win Best Asian Entrepreneur for the 9th United States Stevie Awards 2012?
Kanchan Naikawadi: To receive such a prestigious award and to be recognised globally for all the effort and hard work that we have put in is an exhilarating feeling. Such felicitations ignite your enthusiasm to work more fiercely towards the cause.
The CEO Insights: How do you ensure quality services being serving across your various centres in different cities?
Kanchan Naikawadi: We are an ISO 9001-2008 certified company for the last several years. Maintaining quality and gaining customer satisfaction is our prime precedence. Recently we have been also awarded the Golden Peacock Special Commendation in Healthcare Category for Business Process Excellence. All our processes are certified, maintained, and innovated as per the service delivery parameters and SLAs. We have in-house quality and process audit departments, which relentlessly check our processes and services across 60 delivery partners in 32 towns across 9 states in the country. This has given us the confidence for embarking on more stringent journey like ISO-27001.
This ensures that our quality standards are met effectively.
Also, our deep focus is on people who we believe are the ultimate process owners ensures that customer gets the best service.
The CEO Insights: What is your business model and how revenue streams are being targeted?
Kanchan Naikawadi: Our business is predominantly a business-to-customer model. We have several distribution channels like direct agents, corporate institutional teams and direct marketing representatives etc through which we achieve our revenue goals.
The CEO Insights: Are you considering any strategic alliance or other measures to augment your market reach or business capabilities?
Kanchan Naikawadi: Indus is an aggregator. We have strategic and business alliances with a with gamut of healthcare service providers like national hospital chains, stand alone super speciality hospitals, regional super speciality hospital chains, state of the art diagnostic centres, trust hospitals, clinics, a healthcare support companies to augment our market reach and enhance our business capabilities.
The CEO Insights: How do you see your company evolving in the next five years?
Kanchan Naikawadi: In the past 13 years we have reached out to more than 80 lakh people with the message of prevention. We look forward to reach out to at least ten times that number in the next five years. In pure numbered terms, we look forward to extend our services to at least 100 cities by the end of 2014. The sheer growth of our model has had international governments wanting us to replicate this model in their countries because scourge of cardiac diseases, diabetes and cancer has become a global phenomenon. Hence we need to spread the message of prevention not just in India but across the world.
We are also planning to go global in not less than 10 countries before 2016.
The CEO Insights: Who are your competitors and what has their strategy been in India?
Kanchan Naikawadi: In theory every hospital and diagnostic centre is a competitor and everybody has their unique competitive strengths and weaknesses. We realised that it is best in the interest of everyone if we make our competitors our partners. And that’s how we are able to deliver our preventive health checkups at a price much leser than the prevailing market prices.
The CEO Insights: What kind of domain expertise and skill set you look for in your employees?
Kanchan Naikawadi: Indus welcomes people who feel deeply about the cause of prevention and has a passion for it. That is how we have been able to gather a very dedicated group who are an eclectic mix of Doctors, CAs, Engineers, MBA grads, Para Medicals, Technicians, Post Graduates, and Graduates.
We have people with wide domain and cross functional expertise across various industries.
The CEO Insights: What is your Favorite Book/Movie?
Kanchan Naikawadi: Even though I try to grab every little opportunity that comes way during travelling or otherwise, but am hardly able to finish whatever I start with. So, honestly am not that much of a reader.
Movies, yes! Sometimes, courtesy my kids, I get to watch the latest flicks when I succumb to their emotional persistence.
The CEO Insights: What are your Hobbies?
Kanchan Naikawadi: I take every opportunity to travel. On these travels I try to find something unique, and always carry a ‘try something once’ attitude.
The CEO Insights: Your belief “All work can be play and fun”, how you preach to others?
Kanchan Naikawadi: I totally believe in this mantra. If you love your work, you get immense fun doing it too. Even the day to day challenges and issues that comes your way during work, doesn’t bother you because of your genuine love for the work.
The CEO Insights: Who is your role model?
Kanchan Naikawadi: My uncle, Mr. Sadanand Bapat is my role model in life. He has excellent entrepreneur skills and has been instrumental in moulding my personality into what I am today. I also admire people who have made it big on their own. I appreciate and respect anyone who believes in his dreams and work hard to fulfill it.
The CEO Insights: Is there anything you would like to add?
Kanchan Naikawadi: My message for one and all is to give prevention utmost importance in life.
I say, when
Prevention is simpler than cure.
Prevention is cheaper than cure.
Prevention is less time consuming than cure.
Then why not detect the disease at an early stage through a SIMPLE PREVENTIVE HEALTH CHECK up and “nip the evil in the bud?”
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