(CNS): A world famous heart surgeon is planning to set up a new medical complex in the Cayman Islands which promises not only to provide cheaper health care for residents but to open up the prospect of medical tourism. Dr Devi Shetty (left), who is considered to be a health care visionary by many because of his pioneering work in providing high-quality health care at low cost, has set his sights on Cayman as a potential location for providing serious cardio and tertiary medical care to those from North America and the region.

According to a press release on behalf of Dr Shetty, the new medical facility would bring hundreds of millions of dollars to Cayman and turn the long held belief that Cayman could be a medical tourism destination into a reality. Bangalore, India, where Dr Shetty founded his group of hospitals, the Narayana Hrudayalaya Group, is already enjoying a boom from medical tourism, not least because of Shetty’s approach, which works on the principle of quantity as well as quality to keep costs down.

“Dr Shetty has made it his mission to provide the highest-quality health services to patients who otherwise could not afford treatment,” the release said. Dr Shetty himself is said to perform literally hundreds of serious medical procedures every week and has revolutionized the provision of healthcare.

According to the same release, in a venture with various state governments he founded Yeshasvini Micro Health Insurance, which in its first 20 months of operation enabled 85,000 farmers to receive free medical treatment, including 22,000 free surgeries.

Dr Shetty’s 1,000-bed heart hospital in Bangalore, one of the largest in the world, performs 30 heart surgeries a day. He also runs a 1,500 bed cancer hospital, a “super specialty” eye hospital equipped to perform 500 cataract surgeries a day, a 250-bed trauma and orthopaedic centre, and an academic institution with 48 training programs for medical specialists, nurses, medical technicians, and healthcare administrators.

The idea of bringing a significant sized and multi-disciplinary hospital to Cayman, with its proximity to the US, is driven by a number of factors, including forecasts that medical tourism from there could increase tenfold during the next decade. In 2007, 750,000 American patients went overseas for major healthcare needs; last year the number reached almost 1.5 million. In the US a heart-bypass operation costs on average about $144,000. The same operation in India at one of Dr Shetty’s medical facilities, including airfare and accommodation, is around $8,500.

The plan for Dr Shetty to bring his health care vision to Cayman seems to have government backing. While emphasizing that this is a private initiative, Minister of Health Mark Scotland reportedly said he believed such a project could bring “great benefits” to the Cayman Islands, including on-island availability for tertiary care, which is not available in many instances at local hospitals, as well as lower-costs to patients, insurance companies, and government, and an infusion of high-quality jobs.

Medical tourism, Scotland said, could emerge as the long-elusive “third leg” of the Cayman economy, complementing financial services and the hospitality industry. Premier McKeeva Bush is also said to be supporting the initiative, and government will be exploring the proposal in the coming weeks.

Canover Watson, chairman of the Health Services Authority (HSA), said medical tourism held “great promise” for the Cayman Islands and that the work of Dr Shetty and his facilities in India were a “model” for this industry worldwide.

CNS understands that the planned facility will be considerably bigger than the Chrissie Tomlinson Hospital and the scope of the project was described as “enormous". It will work on Dr Shetty’s principle of carrying out high numbers of procedures every day to keep costs down. The main goal is to attract overseas patients for a diverse range of health services, as well as offering genuine affordable health care to locals. As the project is still in the early stages of development, a spokesperson for the Narayana Hrudayalaya Group said that more details would be revealed in the next few weeks. The key message, however, was that Dr Shetty was aiming to “make Cayman a centre of excellence for health care” and develop the concept of medical tourism for the jurisdiction.