Back in 1999, when I was working for Time-Warner, I did a global study of kids, their aspirations, their heroes and where they saw themselves heading 10 years out.
We interviewed kids in their homes in Bangkok, London, Sal Paulo, Berlin, Beijing, Mexico City, Los Angeles, Paris, Santiago, St. Petersburg, Taipei, Manila, Moscow, New York and Sydney among other cool cities.
The big discovery?
Cell phone technology and the Internet were advancing faster in countries outside of the US…especially countries where conventional wired phone service never really came to be!
Walla… No constraints, no behemoth barriers, no stoppage points that curtailed the technology!
It was like jumping from the first quarter to the third quarter at a UGA football game with the refs sitting there blindfolded!
Now step into the year 2008…
The current May issue of Fast Company Magazine has a featured article in it titled “Medical Leave.”
Here is the lead-in to the article…
“It doesn’t look like a hospital… it feels more like a hotel or an upscale mall. The hospital’s outpatient clinic is more stylish than a bar at my five-star hotel. Instead of waitresses, some two dozen nurses tend to a polyglot mix of patients.”
These hospitals aren’t in the US.
They are in places like Mumbai, Istanbul, Xinjiang, Dubai, Mexico City and Thailand.
It’s the beginning of what is being termed: “Globalization Medicine.”
“Millions of fully-insured patients here in the United States will be connected to hospitals globally. The patients will belong to Blue Cross Blue Shield, UnitedHealth Group and other well-known insurance plans.”
And get this… the services and treatments will be less costly than treatment in the US…and that includes the airline tickets to get them there and back.
Ori Karev, CEO of UnitedHealth International says, “I think you’ll find most of us exploring this. We are a business at the end of the day.”
And the globalization of healthcare delivery is providing a forum of free-thinking…the kind of free-thinking that some folks believe is heresy!
Ruben Toral, the chief marketing director of the a global hospital in Thailand, approaches healthcare as not necessarily a social compact or a universal right, but a quality product to be packaged and sold at a sensible price.
Some compare what is taking place to the same supply-chain advantage that Toyota tapped into with its just-in-time manufacturing model.
“Hospitals are not going to spend any more money or any more time in the movement of that patient through the system than is necessary. They’re going to get the patient in, get them on that global platform, and get them back.”
Are there really better healthcare offerings globally?
Is healthcare advancing elsewhere while we get caught up in the dated system we generated during a time when global healthcare was not as advanced as ours?
Are the cell phones in India and China doing things better and cooler than the cell phones in the US?
Yes. Yes. And YES!
Aetna, with its 37 million members, last year acquired Goodhealth Worldwide, an overseas private insurer.
Atena’s CEO Ronald Williams told investors that the acquisition took place because offshore medicine will be “an important emerging trend.”
Since then Aetna has already set up a pilot project for one customer to begin sending its employers abroad for knee and hip procedures.
BrandVenture works with some super clients in healthcare that do some very cool things like Vanderbilt in its conversion of a mall into a regional healthcare resource center... like DeKalb Medical in its development of a dozen physician practices custom tailored to each local neighborhood... like Walton Regional Medical Center and its construction of a new hospital engineered around the convenience needs of an expanding suburbia... and University of Alabama Birmingham and its conversion of a smaller hospital into one tailored exclusively for Baby Boomers.
The entrepreneurial spirit combined with innovation not only drives change…it redefines the market paradigm.
Sometimes to the point of deciding that the current paradigm simply no longer exists and building the new one from scratch!
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1 comment:
The Fast Company article is getting a lot of traction. As someone who has done some work in medical tourism, the only new information for me was that there are two specialties in the U.S. that could be threatened - cardiology and orthopedics. When the pain starts reaching the physician level, you will start seeing more people take notice. But honestly we are reaching a perfect storm for global healthcare. Many of the overseas hospitals are JCI accredited, offer price packaging and low prices and a level of service that we can only hope to aspire to in this country. Thanks, Anthony Cirillo, FACHE
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