a person · IndiaDevi Prasad Shetty
also: Devi Shetty · Dr Devi Prasad Shetty
A cardiac surgeon who argues about cost the way an industrial engineer does, and who says so in public more often than most surgeons say anything.
Cardiac surgeon, and founder and chairman of Narayana Health, the Bengaluru hospital group built on operating volume and low unit cost. The Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur's own convocation profile states it plainly: "Dr Devi Prasad Shetty is the Founder and Chairman of Narayana Health." He is the person most often quoted on the proposition that heart surgery gets cheaper by being done more often, which is the argument underneath a large part of this directory.
The story Cited · cureus-devi-shetty
The peer-reviewed profile of him in Cureus in 2024 gives the life: born on 8 May 1953 in Kinnigoli, Karnataka; MBBS from Kasturba Medical College, Mangalore, in 1979; cardiothoracic training at Guy's Hospital in London. IIT Kanpur's profile instead records an MBBS from the University of Mysore in 1978 and a master's in surgery there in 1982, with a fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons of England in 2009. The institutions are reconcilable — the Mangalore college was affiliated to that university — and the years are not; both are reported here and neither is preferred.
Narayana Hrudayalaya was founded in 2000. The Cureus profile describes the cardiac hospital as one of the largest in the world with a thousand beds, performing more than thirty major heart operations a day. The same paper records Yeshasvini, the farmers' insurance scheme he built with the Karnataka state government, launched in 2003 "at a nominal premium of 5-7 Indian Rupees" a month — a domestic financing experiment that has nothing to do with foreign patients and explains more about the group's economics than the export trade does.
Health City Cayman Islands, a member of the Narayana network, opened in 2014, and states on its own pages that it is "the first hospital in the Caribbean and one of only six organisations globally to receive the prestigious Joint Commission International (JCI) Enterprise Accreditation". Inference — an Indian group building a hospital an hour from Miami is the clearest single statement in this field about where the customers are; the hospital's own page does not put it that way, and no quotation from him saying so was found for this record.
The Government of India conferred the Padma Shri in 2004 and the Padma Bhushan in 2012, as recorded in the Cureus profile.
Notes
The career operation total widely attached to him traces to a magazine article and was not verified in a first-party or peer-reviewed source; it is not carried here.
The particulars
| role | surgeon, founder |
|---|---|
| iso2 | India (IN) |
| region | South Asia, The Caribbean |
| links | IIT Kanpur — convocation profile · Cureus 2024 profile |
| confidence | medium · needs verification · updated 2026-09-17 |
What it connects to
Sources
- Profile — Dr Devi Prasad Shetty (convocation) — Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur, Dean of Academic Affairs · link (read 2026-09-17)
- Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty: The Visionary Cardiothoracic Surgeon Who Championed Affordable Healthcare — Cureus, 2024;16(10):e70683 · link (read 2026-09-16)
- About Us — Health City Cayman Islands (archived capture, 13 December 2025) — Health City Cayman Islands, via the Internet Archive · link (read 2026-09-17)
- Devi Shetty — Wikipedia · link (read 2026-09-16)
- Narayana Health — Wikipedia · link (read 2026-09-17)
Where it came from: Cited a source named here · Harvested pulled from an open dataset · Trade practice how the trade works, hedged · Inference this project's own reasoning · Field somebody stood there. This record as JSON.