Anant Kumar

CEO, Lifespring Hospitals

Healthcare for All at Lifespring Hospitals
26 minutes, 12.1mb, recorded 2009-08-04
Anant Kumar

India has many wonderful private hospitals, but most are financially out of reach for low-income citizens. Those hospitals that offer free services sometimes cannot provide quality health care. Enter Lifespring Hospital, which provides high-quality care at low prices, particularly to women and children. In this audio interview with Stanford Center for Social Innovation correspondent Sheela Sethuraman, founder Anant Kumar talks about the organization’s origins and mission. He discusses how the enterprise is funded and remains profitable, how it draws on innovative techniques to market itself, and how it recruits and retains talented health care professionals.


Anant Kumar launched the first LifeSpring Hospital in December 2005 as a pilot within Hindustan Latex Family Planning Promotion Trust (HLFPPT). Prior to heading LifeSpring, Kumar was business head of Social Franchising in HLFPPT. Previously, he served as program manager of the Andhra Pradesh Social Marketing Programme and regional manager of HLL. He has a post-graduate diploma in rural management (equivalent to an MBA) from the Institute of Rural Management, and a post-graduate diploma in health care and hospital management from Symbiosis Institute. He received his BA from Delhi University.

Resources:

This free podcast is from our Design For Change series.

For The Conversations Network:

  • Post-production audio engineer: Sheela Sethuraman
  • Website editor: Marguerite Rigoglioso
  • Series producer: Ash Jafari