The latest edition to Durga Pooja map in Chennai is the Apollo specialty hospitals located in Chennai on Anna Salai.  Usually we have Durga pooja in T.Nagar, Besant Nagar, Airport Authority Colony, Avadi, Kolathur and Anna Nagar.  I was pleasantly surprised to see a full fledged Durga Pooja being performed in the hospital premises itself with priests brought in from Bengal.

Apollo hospitals see a very large number of patients coming in from the eastern part of the country, with many of them being terminally ill or undergoing treatments like chemotherapy.  I am sure all such patients really enjoyed this pooja and the hospital management should be appreciated for such a thoughtful gesture, as it brought a ray of hope and joy to patients coming in and missing the pooja back at home.  I am told that on many festive occasions, the head of Apollo group Dr. Pratap C Reddy moves around the hospital personally greeting all the inmates.

From management perspective, I would call it an excellent case of customer experience management.  This is a unique way of making patients from eastern region identify more with the hospital - it’s definitely a new dimension of connecting religious sentiments to positioning in a commercial establishment, no longer an exclusive preserve of politicians alone!