"Intelligence and capability are not enough. There must be the joy of doing something beautiful."
When G. Venkataswamy, affectionately known as Dr. V, retired at the age of 58, he didn't really retire. Instead, he was thinking about McDonald's assembly lines and how they related to opthamology, his life's work. What if you applied the assembly line approach to create more affordable eye care? he wondered. Passionately believing that good vision is crucial to creating economic stability, he mortgaged his home to establish a twelve-bed eye hospital for Southern India's poor.
That was the beginning of Aravind Eye Care System, which has grown to become the largest and most productive eye care system in the world. Using an assembly line approach, Dr. V figured out how to streamline eye care into a smooth, efficient, and cost-effective system. Dr. V also pioneered the idea of mass free eye camps for the poor. The results are staggering: Aravind doctors perform 2,200 surgeries annually compared to 250 surgeries per year in nearby hospitals.
But with the high cost of replacement lenses ($150 a pair), Dr. V's ability to perform surgeries was limited. In 1992, he collaborated with David Green to create Aurolab, a company that uses a creative new technology to manufacture lenses, bringing down the cost to just $5 per pair. Aravind uses a sliding price scale to determine the amount patients pay. Those who can afford to pay the full price of $10 subsidize the 70% who can't.
Though Dr. V died in 2006, after performing over 100,000 successful eye surgeries, his legend lives on in the Aravind Eye Care System. Today there are five Aravind Eye Hospitals in India, serving more than 2 million patients and performing more than 270,000 surgeries a year.
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