Business View Caribbean, November/December 2018

58 59 CARIBBEAN HEART CARE staff of approximately 80 professional doctors, nurses, technicians, and administrators. CHCm was awarded the “Service Provider of the Year” in 2013 by the Trinidad and Tobago Coalition of Ser- vice Industries, and it is the only cardiovascular institution in the Caribbean to have received the European QHA Trent Hospital accreditation. Over the last 25 years, CHCm has seen over 50,000 patients resulting in thousands of lives saved and quality of life improvements, including those of children who have had open-heart sur- gery and other complex cardiac procedures. Over 14,000 patients have had life-saving angiograms and or angioplasties performed by its experi- enced, interventional Cardiology Department, and over 5,000 have undergone cardiac surgery with a mortality rate of less than 1.5 percent. In addition, CHCm has a 24/7 emergency service with car- diologists on call. “If someone is having a heart attack, we can go in within 50 minutes and open up a blocked artery, says Dr. Risshi Rampersad, Di- rector of Cardiology and Research and Education. “We’ve been doing this for over a decade with a lot of success and we are one of the few institu- tions that can do this in the Caribbean within in- ternational standards and timing. Moreover, with our audits, we can compare our mortalities and morbidities of our procedures with the rest of the world, and when we do that, our ranking is within, or better than, international standards.” Left to right: Sunil Buchoon, Dr. Anand Rampersad, Dr. Roopchand, Dr. Natasha Rahaman, Dr. Giovani Teodori, Dr. Rodrick Bhagan, Anil Ghaneshyam, Dr. Kamal Rampersad Rampersad believes that CHCm differentiates itself from other facilities in the quality of its care and its focus on patient satisfaction. “The patient comes first,” he insists. In addition, because of its large size and the fact that it works closely with the government of Trinidad and Tobago, which subsidizes patients who cannot afford to pay for some procedures, Chief Operations Officer, Avi- nash Ramnarine, says the Center has been able to brand itself as the less expensive alternative. “We’re able to do that because of economies of scale and the patient load passing through the institution,” he explains. Regarding the cost of diagnostic and medical procedures, Rampersad notes that CHCm’s pa- tients come in three categories, including “pa- tients who have private insurances - companies that generally pay between 60 to 100 percent of the cost of ‘reasonable and customary’ medi- cal procedures.We also work for the Ministry of Health at even half or less of what we charge privately,” he adds. “The reason we are able to do that is because the government provides us with a large number of patients, so we are able to use the volume in order to reduce the prices, which is negotiated with our suppliers and our doctors who perform the procedures. So, patients who can’t afford it get approved government grants and the government pays for their procedures. The third tier is private patients who pay for their procedures on their own.” Always on the cutting edge with regard to new Cardiology team Christmas lunch