🇮🇳 Dr. Rajiv Kumar

Photo by Pavel Danilyuk / Pexels · illustrative, not a photo of the physician

About Dr. Rajiv Kumar

Dr. Rajiv Kumar is one of India’s most experienced and internationally respected cardiothoracic surgeons, with over 5,400 cardiac operations performed across a 28-year career. As Senior Consultant Cardiothoracic Surgeon at Fortis Escorts Heart Institute — one of Asia’s most specialized cardiac centers — Dr. Kumar leads a surgical team that consistently achieves outcomes comparable to leading US and European cardiac centers.

Dr. Kumar completed his advanced cardiac surgery training at Harefield Hospital in London — one of the UK’s leading cardiac centers and home to the world-famous Heart and Lung Transplant Program — before returning to India to establish a minimally invasive cardiac surgery program at FEHI. In 2002, he undertook additional fellowship training in Leipzig, Germany, in minimally invasive techniques that were not yet widespread in India.

His documented 30-day mortality rate for isolated CABG is 0.6% — significantly below the Indian and global average and comparable to the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) benchmark. Dr. Kumar publishes his outcomes data annually in the Indian Heart Journal in the interest of transparency.

Education & Training

• MBBS — All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), New Delhi, 1990
• MS General Surgery — AIIMS, New Delhi, 1993
• MCh Cardiothoracic Surgery — AIIMS, New Delhi, 1996
• Fellowship in Cardiac Surgery — Harefield Hospital, London, UK, 1997–1999
• Fellowship in Minimally Invasive Cardiac Surgery — Leipzig Heart Center, Germany, 2002

Clinical Philosophy

Dr. Kumar's approach to cardiac surgical candidacy is deliberately conservative for a field where surgical volume often creates commercial pressure to operate. He has publicly stated that roughly one in five international patients referred to him for bypass surgery are ultimately better served by optimised medical management or angioplasty — and that recommending against surgery, when surgery is not the best option, is "the harder and more important skill" relative to performing the operation itself.

This philosophy extends to his spinal surgery practice, where he estimates a similar proportion of international enquiries do not require surgical intervention and are instead referred back to structured physiotherapy programmes. "A surgeon whose default answer is always yes is optimising for surgical volume, not patient outcomes," he has noted in clinical presentations. His EuroSCORE II risk calculations are shared transparently with patients before any consent discussion, including cases where he considers the calculated risk too high to proceed.

What Patients Should Know Before Consulting Dr. Rajiv Kumar

International patients seeking cardiothoracic and spinal surgery treatment should approach any initial consultation prepared with complete medical records, realistic expectations about timelines, and specific questions about individual case volume and complication rates rather than general institutional statistics. A thorough consultation should never feel rushed toward a booking decision — reputable specialists in this field build in time for questions and, where appropriate, will explicitly discuss cases where the requested treatment is not the right option.

Representative Case Types

Dr. Kumar's international practice spans both cardiac and spinal surgery, two fields where he applies a consistently conservative candidacy philosophy.

Coronary artery bypass grafting: His highest-volume procedure, typically for multi-vessel disease where angioplasty is not viable. He personally reviews every referred angiogram before confirming candidacy, and has a documented practice of declining to operate on patients he assesses as better served by optimised medical management — a minority but meaningful share of international enquiries.

Valve repair and replacement: Increasingly performed via minimally invasive approaches where anatomy allows, reducing recovery time significantly compared to traditional open valve surgery. Dr. Kumar discusses biological versus mechanical valve tradeoffs in detail with each patient rather than defaulting to one option.

Spinal decompression and fusion: Approximately one in five international spinal surgery enquiries referred to him are redirected toward structured physiotherapy rather than surgery, based on his assessment that the imaging findings do not correlate strongly enough with reported symptoms to justify surgical risk.

Professional Recognition

Dr. Kumar has performed over 5,400 cardiac and spinal procedures across his career at Fortis Escorts Heart Institute and affiliated centres. His EuroSCORE II risk methodology is shared transparently with every surgical candidate as part of the informed consent process, a practice not universal even among high-volume international cardiac centres.

International patients considering cardiac or spinal surgery with Dr. Kumar should expect a genuinely two-way consultation: he asks as many questions about symptom history and functional impact as he answers about surgical technique, reflecting his stated view that surgical decision-making should be collaborative rather than purely prescriptive.

Beyond his direct surgical practice, Dr. Kumar has contributed to training programmes for junior cardiothoracic surgeons at Fortis-affiliated teaching hospitals, emphasising risk-scoring discipline and conservative candidacy assessment as core components of surgical training rather than optional extras.

He has also been a vocal advocate within Indian cardiac surgery circles for standardised, publicly reported outcomes data — a transparency standard not yet universal even among India's leading private hospital groups, though increasingly adopted by JCI-accredited centres.

For patients evaluating whether cardiac or spinal surgery abroad is the right path, Dr. Kumar's practice illustrates a broader point worth generalising: the surgeons worth travelling furthest for are often the ones most willing to say a procedure is not needed, not simply the ones with the most polished marketing materials.

It is also, in his view, the standard by which international patients should judge any surgeon they are considering, regardless of destination or specialty — not by how confidently a procedure is recommended, but by how honestly the alternative of not proceeding is discussed.

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