A Strategic Leader Built From Hardest Decisions
Dr Priyanka Bahl
Director of Medical Services
A Strategic Leader Built From Hardest Decisions
Dr Priyanka Bahl
Medical Director
Twenty years ago, hospital management in India was not something you chose. It was something you settled for, a quiet corner of the system where clinicians went when their operating years were behind them. Nobody was building a career there. Nobody was walking away from clinical training to get in at the ground floor of something that didn’t yet exist as a profession.
Dr Priyanka Bahl, Director of Medical Services at Apollo Hospitals, made that call anyway. An MBBS, an LLB, an MPhil, and an IIM Ahmedabad qualification sit behind her name, each earned deliberately, each solving a problem the one before it could not. She has led hospitals across every model in Indian healthcare: trust-run, PPP, corporate, company-owned, legacy institutions, and mid-reinvention. She directed citywide COVID operations without a single established protocol to stand on. Her career was never built on waiting for the right moment. It was built on walking into rooms nobody else would enter, and staying until the work was done.
She spoke with TradeFlock about authority, accountability, and what this industry looks like from the inside after two decades in it.
You walked away from anaesthesia mid-training to pursue hospital management at a time when the field barely existed in India. What actually happened?
Honestly, the operating theatre made the decision easier than I expected. You’re standing behind a mask, behind a surgeon; your entire job is to make sure the patient stays under while someone else does the work that matters. At some point, I realised that picture wasn’t going to change, and I didn’t want to spend thirty years in it.
In the early 2000s, AIIMS opened the first postgraduate seat in hospital management and something about that timing felt significant. This field was about to be taken seriously, and there was still room to get in early. The core Shalby team in Ahmedabad gave me my first real footing, which mattered more than I probably acknowledged at the time because the general environment wasn’t exactly encouraging. People had opinions. But what kept me going then and still does is something fairly simple. If you keep your doctors respected, they will keep your patients well. I have not found a reason to revise that in twenty years.
The LLB feels like the most deliberate credential in your portfolio. What problem were you actually solving for?
I had been genuinely interested in medico-legal practice for years before I formally studied it. Short courses, self-directed reading, and enough knowledge to hold a conversation. But there is a specific situation where knowledge without a credential cannot crack.
The senior consultant who has practised for thirty years, from a generation that never considered documentation to be part of medicine, who has enough standing in the institution that a junior administrator pushing back simply doesn’t register as a meaningful challenge. Getting through to that person requires a very different conversation. When you can sit across from them and explain, with the kind of authority the credential gives you, that their own documentation gaps place them personally at legal risk, that the EMR is actually there to protect them and not to create paperwork, that their signature is the thing standing between them and a serious outcome in the case that goes wrong, the conversation lands differently. That’s what the LLB was for.
What does Indian healthcare look like in five years?
The single-operator model is running out of road. Costs are rising, robotics is advancing, and there is a growing expectation of accountability that a standalone setup simply isn’t structured to meet. Consolidation is coming, and the leaders who will do well in that environment are the ones who understand governance as something more than a compliance function.
For the younger generation specifically, the most practical thing I can say is to read on the day the question comes up. Not the next morning, not when things quiet down. The same day. The difference between someone who grows in this work and someone who just puts in years is usually that narrow.
“The responsibilities come like a king. The powers are borrowed. That is the most honest thing I can say about what it means to be a medical director in India today.”
COVID is frequently described as a disruption to healthcare. You seem to experience it as something closer to a revelation.
It showed us something we probably should have already known but hadn’t been forced to confront. Before 2019, changes in this industry moved slowly by design. Quarters were planned, resistance was expected, and progress was measured in careful increments that nobody wanted to rush. There was an assumption beneath it all that this was simply how healthcare worked.
Then Vadil Seva went from idea to operational in 48 hours. Ambulance rotations were rebuilt overnight. Doctors were driving into the city in their own cars with medicines, figuring out the logistics as they went, with nobody handing them a protocol because no protocol existed. What that period made impossible to ignore is that doctors are far more capable of rapid change than the system had ever been willing to credit them for. The bigger shift, though, was cultural. Moving from an environment where blame was the default response to one where accountability is shared is the most significant change in Indian healthcare during my time in it. COVID didn’t build that shift from scratch, but it made it very hard to keep pretending the old way was working.
You described the medical director's authority as borrowed power. That is a remarkably candid characterisation.
It’s accurate, and I think accuracy on this point matters more than protecting the title’s image. The responsibilities are real. Nobody is questioning that. But the actual structural authority to act on those responsibilities sits elsewhere in most Indian hospitals. The ownership level holds the decisions in institutions that are overwhelmingly promoter-driven, and clinical leadership identifies what needs to happen without necessarily having the power to make it happen. Senior consultants make it more complicated still, territorial in ways that cost the institution energy, protected by how long they’ve been there in ways that make challenge genuinely costly. NABH has done what accreditation can do. But you cannot accredit your way to an institutional culture. That gets built from the inside, slowly, using whatever real authority you actually have rather than the authority the title is supposed to represent.
