A Simple Moment Behind a Lifelong Mission
What does it take for a person to dedicate their life to a cause they did not choose, but that chose them? For Rashmi Raghunath, the answer began with a single moment — the day her father listened to her heart and heard something that did not belong there.
Rashmi was twenty-five. She felt fine. She had always felt fine. A little breathless sometimes, a little underweight, but nothing she had ever thought twice about. Then Dr. BB Raghunath, her father and a lifelong government doctor, placed his
stethoscope against her chest when she complained of having a cold and paused.
Six days later, Rashmi was in surgery. She had been living with hypertrophic
obstructive cardiomyopathy — a structural heart condition present since birth — without ever knowing it. She recovered. But she came out of that experience with a question she could not let go of: how many children in rural India were carrying the same condition, with no one listening closely enough to notice?
That question became Catching Hearts Foundation.
A Father Who Never Waited for People to Come to Him
To understand the foundation, you first have to understand the man who inspired it.
Dr. BB Raghunath has spent his career as a Health Officer with the Government of Karnataka doing something that sounds simple but is anything but: going to the
people who cannot come to him. Villages without hospitals. Communities without specialists. Places where a doctor’s visit is not routine but rare.
In rural Karnataka, he is known as the “Baby Shower Doctor.” He earned that name by transforming the way communities in Chikkaballapura, Ramanagara, Chamarajnagar, and the Soliga tribal communities of Yellanduru taluk engaged with maternal healthcare. He introduced community baby showers — gatherings that
made pregnancy a celebration rather than a fear — and in doing so, helped eliminate unsafe home births in one district for three consecutive years.
His belief has never changed. The healthcare system should move toward people, not the other way around. He co-founded Pacemakers 86 Trust, addressing cervical and breast cancer, TB, HIV affected children, the mentally ill, to name a few, long before Catching Hearts existed. He received the Namma Bengaluru Award for his
contributions to public health. He has spoken at TEDx.
Rashmi grew up watching her father live these values every single day. When her own health crisis arrived, she responded exactly the way he had always taught her to
— by looking outward, not inward.
The Scale of a Problem Most People Do Not See
India carries the world’s largest burden of childhood congenital heart disease. In 2021, an estimated 725,000 children in the country were living with CHD — more than any other nation. Each year, over 200,000 more children are born with the condition. Of those, roughly one in five requires medical intervention within the first year of life.
Yet India has only around 300 paediatric cardiac surgeons, spread across approximately 90 cardiac centres — almost all of them in major cities. For a family in a rural district, reaching a specialist is not a matter of convenience. For many, it is simply not possible.
This is what makes congenital heart disease in children such a silent crisis. It is often invisible for years. Children grow up feeling mostly fine — a little breathless, a little tired — until something goes wrong. Undetected structural heart conditions are a significant cause of sudden cardiac events in teenagers. Critical defects, if not caught early, can be fatal.
The tools to detect these conditions exist. They are simply not reaching the
communities that need them most. That is the gap Catching Hearts Foundation is trying to close.
Purpose Carried Alongside Profession
What sets Rashmi’s story apart is not just what she built, but how she built it.
She has not stepped away from her professional career. She continues in a leadership role at MongoDB, managing teams across the Asia-Pacific region. Every hour outside of that work goes to the foundation. Evenings, weekends, early mornings — all of it.
She does not describe this as a sacrifice. It is simply, in her own words, where her time needs to go. Her father has lived the same way for decades — holding a full government career while running health camps, co-founding a trust, and now building a foundation alongside his daughter. For both of them, the work and the mission have always existed together, not in place of each other.
This quiet parallel commitment is, in many ways, the most honest reflection of who they are.
Taking the Clinic to the Child
The model behind Catching Hearts Foundation is built on the same principle that Dr. Raghunath has followed throughout his career: do not wait for people to come to you. Go to them.
The foundation runs free echocardiogram-based cardiac screening camps at schools and community health centres in rural areas. Families who have never had access to a cardiac specialist receive a consultation. For most, the most important thing they
hear is that their child’s heart is healthy. For the ones where a condition is found, that camp changes everything.
A Voice on the TEDx Stage
In 2025, Rashmi took the Catching Hearts story to the TEDx stage. She did not speak about milestones or metrics. She spoke about her father — about the moment he heard something in her heartbeat that no one else had noticed, about the six days between that moment and her surgery, and about what it means when luck is the only thing standing between a child and a diagnosis.
It is the kind of talk that stays with you.
Looking Ahead with Quiet Determination
Today, Rashmi and Dr. BB Raghunath are still running camps, still expanding into new communities, still looking for the next village that has not yet been reached.
Their story is not one of sudden breakthroughs or dramatic turning points. It is a story of consistent, patient effort — of two people who saw a problem clearly and decided, without fanfare, to spend their time addressing it.
India has over 200,000 children born with heart conditions every year. Most of them are in communities where no one is currently listening closely enough. Rashmi says it plainly: it is the right of every child to know their heart is healthy.
She has been saying it since before the foundation existed. She does not seem like she is planning to stop.
Learn more at catchingheartsfoundation.com
