Single Shot

Vishal Bali of Asia Healthcare Holdings is addressing a demand-supply gap in health care by building a host of single-specialty hospitals across India

- By MANU BALACHANDRAN

Vishal Bali breathes health care.

That is all that he has done all his life.

Bali is not a doctor by training, unlike some of his contemporaries at India's leading corporate hospitals. The 58-year-old was a former CEO of Wockhardt and Fortis, two of the largest multispecialty hospitals in India before building a host of single-specialty hospitals across the country.

Each of these hospitals—under the aegis of Asia Healthcare Holdings (AHH) and backed by Singapore’s sovereign fund GIC—is focussed on a particular area of care. These include Motherhood Hospitals, which specialise in maternity care, Nova IVF, which focuses on fertility treatment, and the Asian Institute of Nephrology and Urology, which concentrates on kidney care. In 2019, the company exited CTSI, a chain of hospitals focussed on oncology. “The single-specialty space is now about $15 billion, of which $5 billion is in the organised space,” Bali, executive chairman of AHH, tells Forbes India. “If you look at the last 10 years, 39 percent of the overall funding in the health care sector has gone into the single-specialty segment.”

Last December, GIC became the largest shareholder in AHH after investing $150 million, leaving TPG, the initial backer, as a minority shareholder. To date, AHH has invested approximately $300 million across its hospitals. The $150 million investment from GIC will support its foray into new areas, including gastrointestinal, diagnostics and pathology.

AHH operates 25 Motherhood Hospitals across 12 cities, over 120 Nova IVF Fertility centres in 65 cities and seven Asian Institute of Nephrology and Urology centres in four cities. “Because of the massive demand-supply gap in health care in the country, we are beginning to see all formats of health care morph, and become sustainable and profitable,” says Bali about the comparisons between single-specialty and multispecialty hospitals.