India’s paediatric healthcare landscape is evolving, but access to coordinated, specialist-led care remains a significant gap, particularly for children requiring complex treatment. In an exclusive interview, Dr. Silky Jain, Senior Paediatric Haemato-Oncologist & BMT Physician, Founder & CEO, Lavender Lane, shares with Dr. Asawari Savant of Elets News Network (ENN), why India needs a more child-centric model of super-speciality care and how Lavender Lane aims to reshape the delivery of paediatric healthcare through an integrated, day-hospital approach. Edited excerpts
What gap in India’s paediatric care delivery convinced you this needed to exist as an independent venture rather than being fixed from within the system?
I spent fifteen years inside institutional medicine, and honestly, every one of those years I watched the same thing happen. Parents sleeping on hospital chairs beside a sick child, night after night, because our system was simply never designed around what a child actually needs. A child is not a small adult, but our wards, our corridors, even our waiting rooms are still adult spaces that someone once adapted and called it enough. I did try to change things from inside. A gentler protocol here, a kinder conversation there. But there’s only so much you can shift when the structure itself pushes back. At some point I realised certain gaps can’t be patched. They need to be rebuilt from scratch, with the child as the very first decision, not an afterthought. Lavender Lane happened because I couldn’t keep telling myself that a sick child has to lose their childhood just to get well. Every parent who has held their child’s hand through a diagnosis deserves more than what I was able to give them from inside that system.
What specific unmet need in paediatric super-speciality care did your years in institutional medicine reveal to you that the broader healthcare industry has been slow to address?
As a paediatric haemato-oncologist, I’ve sat across the table from parents on the worst day of their lives, telling them their child has cancer or a serious blood disorder. And then I’d watch them get sent from department to department, trying to piece together one coherent plan out of five different opinions. India simply doesn’t have enough trained paediatric super-specialists, and almost nowhere are they actually brought together to work around one child, as one team. Families end up becoming their own care coordinators at the exact moment they’re least equipped for it, emotionally, physically, in every way. The industry has been slow to understand that this isn’t a minor inconvenience. It delays diagnosis, it delays treatment, and in childhood cancer, time is everything we have. I built Lavender Lane because no parent should have to fight a fragmented system just to get their child seen by the right specialists, together, at once.
How is Lavender Lane’s care model structurally different from both government institutions and existing private paediatric hospitals, and why does that difference matter commercially, not just clinically?
Lavender Lane is a specialist child care centre that brings every paediatric speciality under one calm roof, from haemato-oncology and neurology to pulmonology, gastroenterology, endocrinology, cardiology and nephrology, with specialists who talk to each other first, before they talk to the family. So parents leave with one plan, not five conflicting opinions to translate on their own.
The second thing that makes us different is the model itself. Lavender Lane is built as a day hospital, a concept that is well established in children’s healthcare in the UK and Europe but has barely existed in India until now. The idea is beautifully simple. A child comes in the morning, receives treatment that would normally mean days of admission, chemotherapy, a transfusion, an infusion, and goes home the same evening, to their own bed. Clinically, that changes how a child experiences illness. Commercially, it changes the cost of delivering that care, because a day hospital is simply lighter to run and staff than rows of in-patient beds.
That combination, specialist-led and built as a day hospital, with diagnostics and pharmacy in-house, isn’t something government institutions or most private hospitals are designed around, because none of them started from the child and worked backward. For me, the clinical logic and the commercial logic happen to point the same way, and that’s really what makes this sustainable, not just well-intentioned.
What impact are you aiming to create at scale, is this a single-centre model, or do you see Lavender Lane as a template for paediatric super-speciality care delivery across other underserved urban markets in India?
Every child I’ve treated over the last fifteen years reminded me this problem was never about one city or one hospital. It’s the story of paediatric care across India. Our Noida centre, which opens this August, has been deliberately built to be repeatable, not a one-off flagship. Same specialist-led structure, same day hospital infrastructure, same in-house diagnostics and pharmacy, built to travel. We already have our Delhi centre under fit-out, opening in 2027, and my hope is that this eventually becomes how paediatric super-speciality care gets delivered in underserved urban markets across the country. I didn’t leave institutional medicine to build one better hospital. I left to help build a category. If the day hospital becomes something parents across India ask for by name, that will matter far more than any single centre we open.
From a business standpoint, what’s the unique strength or differentiator you believe will make Lavender Lane defensible as competition in paediatric care increases, is it the day hospital model, the specialist-led team structure, or something else?
Honestly, it’s not any one piece on its own. It’s that all four parts hold each other up, and that’s what makes it hard to copy halfway. The day hospital model only works if senior specialists are leading every visit, because it takes real judgment to know when a child can safely go home the same evening and when they can’t. That specialist-led structure only works if every speciality sits under one roof with diagnostics and pharmacy in-house, so nothing gets delayed by a referral across the city. And none of it means much to a frightened parent unless there’s one care navigator staying with the family from the first phone call to the last follow-up. As a mother myself, I know families remember how they were made to feel, not only whether they were treated well clinically, and that kind of trust builds slowly in a way no competitor can shortcut. That’s our real strength, not one feature, but a whole system built around the child that’s genuinely difficult to copy piece by piece.
You made a deliberate move from a secure institutional post to founding a venture in a sector that requires significant capital and long gestation periods. What convinced you the paediatric super-speciality segment is commercially viable at this point in India’s healthcare market?
Leaving a secure position at ESIC Medical College wasn’t an easy decision. I won’t pretend it was. But every child I couldn’t treat quite the way they deserved made it a little clearer each year. India’s awareness of paediatric super-specialities is finally catching up. Parents are asking better questions, insurers are slowly starting to recognise day-care procedures, and urban families increasingly want dedicated paediatric expertise instead of adapted adult care. Rising incomes, growing insurance coverage and a real shortage of trained paediatric super-specialists all point to a segment that’s underserved, not unviable. Those are two very different things. I also believe healthcare shouldn’t be built on financial logic alone, so we structured Lavender Lane so that the business model and the clinical mission support each other instead of pulling in opposite directions. The long gestation period never really scared me. What scares me is a child not getting the right care in time, and that’s what convinced me the timing was right, now, not later.
Also Read: Indian Medical Tourism in 2026: Access, Authenticity and Expansion Strategy for Healthcare Leaders
What are your plans regarding scaling and expansion of Lavender Lane in the coming 3-5 years, and what will this progression look like?
Our Noida flagship opens this August with full day hospital infrastructure, an in-house lab and a paediatric pharmacy, and our Delhi centre is already under fit-out for a 2027 opening, so the first phase of expansion is already underway. Over the next three to five years, I want to take this same model, every speciality under one roof, specialist-led teams, treatment delivered as a day hospital rather than a hospital stay, into other underserved urban markets where children currently travel long distances just for a basic super-speciality consultation. I want Lavender Lane to become something parents trust instinctively, the way they trust a family paediatrician, except at super-speciality depth. Alongside opening new centres, I care just as much about the Lavender Lane Standard, our public, measurable promise to families, because growth without accountability isn’t the kind of growth I set out to build. Every expansion decision comes back to the same question I’ve asked myself since I first became a doctor: does this get one more child home, to their own bed, sooner. If the answer is yes, that’s where we build next.
Like
Dislike
Be a part of Elets Collaborative Initiatives. Join Us for Upcoming Events and explore business opportunities. Like us on Facebook , connect with us on LinkedIn and follow us on Twitter , Instagram.
"Exciting news! Elets technomedia is now on WhatsApp Channels Subscribe today by clicking the link and stay updated with the latest insights!" Click here!
