Yesterday in Bangalore I felt honoured to attend a function of my friend and fellow EO -member Dr. Arjun Kalyanpur and his wife Dr. Sunita Maheshwari. Arjun is a radiologist, his wife Sunita a pediatric cardiologist. Five years ago, without having an M.B.A. or financial backing, this doctor-couple started a company out of their living room: Teleradiology Solutions. A medical service provider which delivers radiology-reports from Bangalore to the world. Or like Sunita explained: “A brown company in a white space.” Today the company boasts 160 employees and sits in the reputed technology-district of Whitefield in outer Bangalore. This is the building with the chaotic Indian reality to the left, and the highly performing Indian reality to the right. (All the pictures from the function are here in my Flickr-Set ).
Teleradiology Solutions’ value proposition is very straightforward: Enhance the capacity of radiologists to hospitals in the U.S., Singapore and India by a remote service, including a cost-advantage, where radiologists in India would receive digital scans via broadband. In their speciality “emergency cases”, these tele-doctors would submit their diagnosis back as fast as 30 minutes. The company is the only provider outside of Singapore which has been granted the necessary approval by the Singapore Health Ministry to do so and is currently making inroads to Europe as well.
The reason for yesterday’s function at 5 pm for High Tea was the next consequential step to enable the company’s further growth. Hence, a state-of-the-art training facility under the Sanskrit name of “Rad Gurunkel” has been inaugurated. The guest of honour to do so was Ms. Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, founder and Chairman of Biocon Ltd . Ms Shaw, besides being the richest woman in India, is highly respected across the entire country and often quoted as a role-model for women to reach highest achievements in a predominantly male-dominated society. Ms. Shaw is here with the candle lighting the lamp, Arjun to the right in the black suit.
The speeches of Ms. Shaw, Arjun and Sunita reflected pretty much the key-challenge for knowledge-driven companies like Biocon and Teleradiology Solutions: Scale. Getting the right people on board, bringing them to the required level of skills, and retaining them by growing these skills. Likewise, Infosys has recently invested US-$ 300 mn into an entire campus in Mysore. Being an entrepreneur myself, I felt amazed by the level of meticulous detail how Arjun’s company has artfully crafted processes which would be able to replicate quality of a radiology diagnosis 8,000 km such as if the doctor was right sitting beside his patient. There is for instance one FTE (full time employee) only taking care that the regulatory requirements from the U.S. are met and audited accordingly.
Constant training of medical, technical and administrative staff has according to Arjun in the past proved the most important factor in attaining that quality along with a very low defect-rate in this not very error-tolerant area. In order to be able to take the company to the next level, the new training facility will be able to scale and institutionalize the various training programmes. Here is Arjun on the right (still in the black suit, not in a white lab coat :-) and me to the left.
I wish Arjun and Sunita and all the fantastic people I met in their company yesterday all the best for their future aspirations which are constantly bolstered by hard work, dedication and honesty. In that respect, I felt deeply moved by a quotation which Sunita brought forward from the great Mahatma Gandhi: “Learn as if you will live forever, live as if you will die tomorrow.”
Feeds