Knowledge Hub

Q: You built a successful medical career in the U.S. What made you return to Pakistan, and build a hospital in Balochistan?

Dr. Sohail Khan: The decision was gradual. I grew up in Balochistan, a province in Pakistan that borders Afghanistan and Iran. Historically, it’s been underserved, healthcare, education, jobs, while also dealing with instability and insurgency for decades. These realities were part of my upbringing.
I was fortunate to attend a boarding school when I was 13, then study medicine at Aga Khan University. After that, I moved to the U.S. and trained for many years in internal medicine, cardiology, interventional cardiology, vascular medicine. I worked across the U.S.; New York, Boston, Louisiana, Phoenix, Salt Lake City. It exposed me to different cultures and taught me flexibility, respect, and leadership.

But I always had an “itch” to give back, especially after seeing my own mother need urgent ICU care when there wasn’t a dedicated ICU available for a city of about 4 million people. When you reach a point in life where you’ve achieved what you set out to achieve, you start looking for impact beyond money. I wanted to do something that mattered.

Q: When you came back and started AIMS, what was the biggest challenge?

Dr. Sohail Khan: I experienced two major challenges. First: human capacity. A hospital isn’t just a building, it’s people. In bigger cities you can hire experienced managers in procurement, HR, marketing, operations. In Quetta, that talent pipeline is limited. For years while building this, I wore multiple hats, marketing, HR, procurement, because there simply weren’t enough people with those skill sets available.Second: security and operating environment. This is a tribal culture with active instability. Navigating that while recruiting strong clinicians and building trust takes vision, stamina, and constant leadership.But with hard work, some luck, and most importantly a clear vision, we were able to achieve in two years what many systems struggle to do in far easier environments.

Q: How did you build a capable workforce so quickly—especially in a region with limited talent pipelines?

Dr. Sohail Khan: We invested in training and we made a deliberate choice to prioritize women’s employment and leadership. I’ll give you a real example: a young woman in our quality department, 22 years old, learned the SafeCare quality framework extremely quickly. She is from a minority community that faces discrimination, and she also has albinism, which created additional barriers for her in society. But she’s also a law student and an entrepreneur.  In environments like this, talent often exists, it’s just under-recognized and under-supported. If you train people, give them responsibility, and build a culture of standards, they rise. Women, especially, are often deeply dedicated in these roles when given the opportunity.

Q: How do you lead and operate amid ongoing instability and security concerns?

Dr. Sohail Khan: You don’t become “desensitized,” especially if you have a family. But when your purpose is clear, you keep moving. It does affect recruitment, convincing top talent to relocate to unstable regions is difficult. So we provide practical support: housing near the hospital, incentives, strong career paths, leadership opportunities.

And there’s another truth: for many people later in life, once the “achievement cycle” slows down, there’s a search for purpose. When you shift from “taker mode” to “giver mode,” the question becomes: How does my existence create impact beyond myself? When you can create jobs and build systems that serve people, that purpose carries you through the hard parts.

Q: How did you build trust with local communities, and handle competition or criticism?

Dr. Sohail Khan: Healthcare is a service industry. It’s also a hospitality industry in many ways: how you treat people matters. Trust is built by consistently aligning decisions with quality. When patients feel they’re at the center of your universe, trust follows. And once you become the busiest private hospital, competitors respond, sometimes aggressively, including misinformation on social media.  My answer is always the same: improve services, improve quality, treat patients well. Over time, that becomes the strongest reputational defense.

Q: AIMS is a private hospital. How do you address equity concerns in a low-resource region?

Dr. Sohail Khan: It’s an important question. My view is: bad-quality care costs more, through complications, delays, and repeated treatment. We see cases that illustrate this. For example, a child treated for a year as if she had a bone infection, multiple antibiotics, until we ran the right diagnostic process and discovered it was actually cancer. We are the only facility in the province offering certain capabilities, such as frozen section pathology in that example. At the same time, we also provide care beyond what people expect from a private institution: Free cornea transplants, free treatment for congenital heart disease cases and subsidized pricing for key services (including advanced imaging).

How do we sustain this? Through a diversified service model, some services may run at a loss, but the broader portfolio supports it. We also have a U.S.-registered non-profit pathway so donors can directly support patient care. And because the hospital is already operational, donated funds can go straight to treatment rather than heavy administrative overhead.

Q: On a personal level, what keeps you going?

Dr. Sohail Khan: I’ve experienced personal loss. My first daughter was born in Salt Lake City, and she passed away during delivery while I was in training. I went on to have three more children born in the U.S., and my youngest was born recently in Pakistan.  My children may choose to live in the U.S. in the future, and I won’t stop them. We’re global citizens now. With today’s technology, you can build the right structure and lead across geographies. What keeps me going is purpose, and the belief that healthcare and education are among the most powerful ways to change a society.

Dr. Khan’s story is a reminder that health system transformation isn’t only about facilities or technology, it’s about leadership under constraint, the discipline of standards, and building the human capacity that makes quality sustainable. From job creation to nursing education, AIMS is evolving as both a care provider and a local platform for opportunity, demonstrating how purpose, governance, and talent strategy can move a system from scarcity to momentum.