Governance of private sector corporate hospitals and their financial performance: preliminary observations based on analysis of listed and unlisted corporate hospitals in India

Abstract

This paper analyses financial performance of corporate hospitals in India. While studying the financial performance of hospitals in our previous work we observed that there are some distinct differences between unlisted and listed hospitals. It is hypothesised that corporate hospitals which are listed on the stock exchanges are likely to be more aware about corporate governance issues and ensure better utilisation of resources and meet expectation of various stakeholders. We study the differences in listed and unlisted hospitals in this paper. The findings suggest that operating cost ratio of listed hospitals is significantly different and lower from the unlisted hospitals. We also find that borrowings of unlisted hospitals are much higher than listed hospitals because they have no access to capital markets to raise money. This increase the financial vulnerability of unlisted hospitals as their ability to service the debt is low. We discuss the implications of these results.