Buy, build or partner: entering a new care format
How a hospital group should choose between acquiring a chain, building organically or partnering with an operator, and why the exit must be designed before entry.
Author: Gaurav Phogat
Gaurav Phogat runs digital for one of Asia’s largest hospital groups — patient acquisition, CRM, AI and the platforms behind them — and writes about growth and digital from the operator’s seat. Engineer by training, MBA from ISB. Based in Hyderabad.
-
-
Building a consumer platform without losing the hospital
The entity, data-rights and commercial questions behind a unified patient app in a hospital group, and how to avoid building a startup the hospital does not need.
-
Why most hospital AI pilots never reach production
Ownership, the missing run-team, integration debt, procurement and change management — and the eight decisions worth making before a pilot starts.
-
Where AI belongs in the patient journey — and where it does not
A stage-by-stage map of the hospital patient journey, and an honest view of which stages tolerate automation, which need a human, and which a bot actively harms.
-
What a hospital CRM is actually for
A CRM earns its keep only when it causes an outbound action that would not otherwise have happened. Everything else is infrastructure for that, or decoration.
-
What a digital head owes the CFO
Speaking the finance function’s language: the hospital cost lines that matter, capex versus opex, and funding work whose payback outlasts the budget cycle.
-
The twelve months before a hospital opens: a checklist
A month-by-month sequence for digital readiness before a new hospital unit opens, and an honest split between what must be live on day one and what can wait.
-
The politics of centralisation, and how to survive them
Unit heads carry the number and you do not. What that asymmetry means for what you centralise, in what order, and what you must promise in return.
-
The multi-unit patient acquisition funnel, honestly mapped
There is no group funnel. There are eleven unit funnels, each shaped by catchment, maturity and payer mix, and averaging them hides every decision worth making.
-
The first ninety days after opening: what to watch
Which numbers are trustworthy in a new hospital’s first quarter, which ones mislead, and when a soft month two justifies changing the marketing mix.