Sumit Sinhal

Out of a population of over 1.4 billion, a staggering 100 million people in India have diabetes. Another 136 million are estimated to be pre-diabetic. In the so-called diabetes capital of the world, says Sumit Sinhal, “millions are pushed below the poverty line as they suffer from the disease, because they do not have accessible, affordable, and available healthcare.” To help address this crisis, he created Kins Health in 2011, starting with a diabetes clinic in Siliguri, West Bengal.

Sinhal’s choice of locale was deliberate. Nestled in the foothills of the Himalayas, the area is famous for its tea; workers pluck buds in the fields, which will eventually end up on genteel tables as pots of fragrant Darjeeling tea. Diabetic pickers commonly develop foot ulcers, which can turn gangrenous and require amputations. “It’s not just a healthcare impact; it’s a social impact as well,” Sinhal explains. “Because if there’s an amputation, they become a burden on their entire family and on society.”

The community welcomed the clinic, and Sinhal next opened a 50-bed hospital to handle the conditions that often accompany the disease. Specialists in nephrology, cardiology, internal medicine, neurology, and endocrinology provide comprehensive care. “We take care of everything across the spectrum of the disorder,” he says.

Through those two facilities, as well as community programs that provide testing and education, Kins Health has reached over 250,000 people over the last 14 years and grown from a team of 17 to over 300 staff members.

“I may not be able to solve all the problems of the world,” Sinhal says, “but at least there should be one problem of the world, in one geography, where I can make a difference.”

How did you decide to go into healthcare?

My dad runs a healthcare medicine distribution business, but I wanted to be more in the provider space. That’s where you get to meet patients and make a real impact. It pains me when we see so many people dying for basic health necessities and primary healthcare.

Why start your own company rather than join an established one?

One great thing about entrepreneurship, especially when you’re starting up, is that a lot of quick decisions can be made. Big organizations and corporations are like cruise liners; they move slowly. Startups are more like speedboats. They maneuver quickly, you can experiment with a lot of things. So I chose to jump on the entrepreneurial bandwagon right after my MBA.

Tell us more about where you’re located.

We’re in my hometown in eastern India. The geography is pretty interesting because we’re surrounded by Nepal, Bhutan, and Bangladesh. And we’re also surrounded by four neighboring states in India. So we’re not only serving the population of an individual city, but we’re actually catering to the healthcare needs of three countries and four states. It’s a big catchment area where we can help a lot of people in a large section of society.

Was it smooth sailing from the start?

I had no work experience. I was bubbling over with energy, but there was very little direction to that energy. We first started out with a diagnostic center and it soon dawned on me that I wanted to be in healthcare but not in the diagnostic space. It wasn’t a blue ocean; there were a lot of players already there. We wanted to pivot to something else, and that something else came to us as a super-speciality facility — providing great-quality diabetes care in a low-resource setting.

Why did you expand beyond that initial clinic model?

There’s only so much we could do inside the physical space of a clinic. So we reached out to the community since awareness and early detection are key to diabetes management. Five years into our journey, we realized it wasn’t enough just to provide outpatient services for preventative care; we wanted to get into the curative side for comorbidities and provide end-to-end care to every diabetic patient.

So it’s about management as much as treatment?

Diabetes can be managed for 90% of people, and research has shown that 75% of the care for diabetes is in patients’ hands. People need to learn what kind of food to eat, what kind of exercises to do, how to manage stress. It’s about helping people make the right kinds of choices, educating patients about the kind of lifestyle they’re supposed to lead when it comes to diabetes management.

Do any of your patients really stand out to you?

Yes, I can vividly remember one 65-year-old lady. When she came to us, she could barely move, and her quality of life was bad. Over a period of six to eight months, we got her onto a good medical regime. Our doctors helped keep her physically and mentally motivated. Our nutritionists worked with her to make sure she ate right. She took her medicine, and her blood sugar levels came down. She got out of her wheelchair, started doing routine walks, strengthened her muscles.

That patient now talks to a lot of other patients about her journey and how she thought it was the end of her life. She’s become an advocate for a healthier lifestyle and better diabetes management. She’s the example of how a real impact is made in diabetes care.

Do you still have time for patient interaction, given the current scope of Kins Health?

Definitely my role in the company has changed. One thing I learned from Stanford Seed is the difference between working in your business or on your business. Pivoting to working on my business saves me from not firefighting every day. That said, it is very, very important as an entrepreneur, especially in the healthcare industry, to stay connected with your customers and understand their pain points.

Sounds like Seed helped catalyze your leadership priorities?

Impact is strongly ingrained in the Seed community, and as a result, we always think, act, and do things at our company with impact in mind. Also, Seed designs courses for small- and medium-sized entrepreneurs like me in low-resource and emerging market settings. So the case studies are fantastic, because our problems are unique and different to those of the big multinational corporations. You learn about an idea in class, then go back the next day and think about how to apply those concepts in your workplace. It’s truly been transformational to us as a company.

You’ve talked about scaling up to become the largest diabetes care service provider for India. How do you plan for that level of growth?

We want to bring together entrepreneurship and clinical services, and help doctors become entrepreneurs. Clinicians affect people with diabetes, but there’s so much more they can do. There’s an entire ecosystem that needs to be built. Doctors are very good at the clinical side, but they’re scared from a business standpoint. What would resourcing look like? How do you hire staff? What do systems look like? How do you manage regulation and licensing? So we’ve chosen the franchise model and we’re drawing a playbook to give doctors as part of that.

Aren’t there challenges to scaling across a diverse country like India?

As much as there’s opportunity, the challenges are equal in nature — our lifestyles, religions, festivals, and food habits differ. There are over 100 languages spoken in India. So, yeah, we are cognizant of the challenges ahead for this model. But we always feel that the purpose will supersede the challenges, and we’ll figure out a way as we move forward.

Do you take your own health into account?

Yeah, definitely. A doctor recently told me that 60% of our metabolism slows down after seven o’clock at night. So I make conscious efforts to not eat after seven o’clock. I wear a Fitbit smartwatch and I do 10,000 steps every single day. I’m a vegetarian, so I eat things that help me get the right kind of protein, and I cut down on my carbs.

You’re a model patient. That’s amazing.

My wife has a serious problem with that. She has a sweet tooth. I realized one success to married life is to not cross boundaries that’ll land you in trouble. So I choose what I want to eat. And she absolutely gets to choose whatever she wants to eat. I don’t enter that territory.

Photos courtesy of Sumit Sinhal