The context
Millions of people globally suffer from preventable blindness due to lack of access to affordable eye care. Traditional healthcare delivery models struggle to scale cost-effectively while maintaining quality.
The key opportunity and threat
- Opportunity – to dramatically increase access to high-quality, affordable healthcare
- Threat – high costs, limited capacity, and inefficiencies restricting scale
What they do that is special
Aravind fundamentally rethought the operating model
- Standardised procedures to enable high-volume, high-quality surgery with consistent outcomes
- Applied industrial efficiency principles (flow, specialisation, throughput) to clinical environments
- Designed a tiered pricing model, where paying patients subsidise free care for those who cannot afford it
- Maximised utilisation of key resources, particularly surgeons, by redesigning roles and workflows
- Built an end-to-end system, from outreach to surgery to follow-up, ensuring scale and accessibility
- Focused relentlessly on process excellence, not just clinical excellence
For example…
In a typical operating theatre, a surgeon may perform one operation at a time with significant downtime between procedures. At Aravind, workflows are redesigned so that a surgeon operates on two patients in parallel, with support staff preparing the next patient while the current procedure is completed.
This dramatically increases throughput without compromising quality. Combined with highly standardised processes, this allows Aravind to perform far more surgeries per day than traditional hospitals, at a fraction of the cost. The breakthrough is not in the surgery itself, but in the system that surrounds it.
This has enabled Aravind to perform millions of surgeries at world-class quality and extremely low cost, transforming access to care
Problem framing – are you optimising within your current model, or fundamentally rethinking it?
Operating model design – how well is your model structured for scale, efficiency and consistency?
Throughput vs effort – where could you significantly increase output without increasing resources?
Cross-industry learning – what proven ideas from other sectors could you apply to your context?
Resource utilisation – how effectively are you using your most critical assets?
Accessibility and reach – how could you redesign your model to serve more customers or users?
Ambition gap – if this level of transformation is possible, what assumptions are you holding onto that need to be challenged?