For the cover story in last month's HealthLeaders magazine, I noted that U.S. employers are aggressively trimming healthcare benefits and some are looking to get out of employer-sponsored coverage entirely.
As these employers get creative in offering lower cost benefits, global hospitals and medical travel facilitators can, to a degree, step in and fill some of the void for employees turned healthcare consumers. At the same time, however, we're seeing that necessary electives are down—mirroring other consumer purchases—because of the uncertain economy.
"I would speculate that some of this is due to employees either not having or not wanting to spend the $2,500-$5,000 out-of-pocket amount required for certain non-emergent procedures," says David Boucher, president of Companion Global Healthcare. "Some of the reduction may be due to employees not wanting to be out of work on rehab when downturns affect their employers."
I had an e-mail conversation today with Boucher, who is one of the best traveled healthcare executives you'll meet (he wrote to me from the IMTA conference in Singapore). Your travel and discretionary spending budget might have been slashed as a result of this deep global recession, but Boucher continues his globetrotting ways as Companion keeps adding to its network of JCI-accredited hospitals.
Last week Companion added CIMA hospitals in Mexico, giving U.S. clients and employer groups a medical travel option that's much closer to home.
I've heard people scoff at the notion of healthcare consumers enduring a 30-hour flight to Asia for knee-replacement surgery, but an hour-long trip to Monterrey seems a lot less laughable. In addition to the attraction of proximity, Boucher adds that with an influx of U.S. residents of Latin descent, this lets them get cheaper care in their home country.
Still, the skeptics might point out—as I did with Boucher—that there's been a spike in gang activity and kidnappings in Mexico lately. He says Companion is watching U.S. State Department travel alerts closely and is recommending that consumers fly directly to CIMA hospitals in Monterrey and Hermosillo, rather than driving across the border. Most of the violence is happening in border towns. "I've been to both communities and these hospitals recently and felt perfectly safe," says Boucher.
Last year, when Companion added ParkwayHealth Hospitals in Singapore to its network, Boucher told me he thought his entire network would grow to about a dozen high-quality global hospitals, but now says he thinks the network will top off at 20 to 25 hospitals. In the case of these CIMA hospitals, he says employer groups and individual consumers have been requesting that Companion offer Mexico as an option.
Medical device maker Medtronic Inc. has announced that it will begin disclosing payments to U.S. physicians. Medtronic will begin capturing payment data for all of its businesses on Jan. 1, 2010, and will publicly report the information annually. The first disclosure will occur in March 2011, addressing payments made to doctors during 2010.
Christopher M. O'Connor, the president of Massachusetts-based Caritas St. Elizabeth's Medical Center, is leaving the hospital immediately to pursue other opportunities, according to a spokeswoman for the six-hospital chain. O'Connor, who was head of the flagship hospital of Caritas Christi Health Care for 2 1/2 years, will continue in a limited consulting role at the institution. John J. Holiver, president of Caritas Good Samaritan Medical Center in Brockton, will take the helm of St. Elizabeth's
Good healthcare is preventive, predictive, and personalized, a rarity today in a crisis-oriented care system far better at treating disease than keeping it at bay. To help change that, the Institute of Medicine has started a major push for what patients might call whole-body wellness care.
Washington voters approved Initiative 1000 in November, which will allow physicians to legally prescribe lethal medication to competent, terminally ill patients given six months or less to live. The patient must be an adult Washington resident who voluntarily asks for the lethal drug and self-administers it. More than 110 hospice nurses, physicians, social workers, psychologists, and other professionals recently attended a seminar on the subject sponsored by the Washington State Hospice and Palliative Care Organization, along with the Washington State End of Life Consensus Coalition.
For 30 years, studies consistently have found that doctors call one out of every five or six patient encounters "difficult." The latest, published in the Archives of Internal Medicine, found that primary-care doctors who felt they had a high number of "difficult" patient encounters were younger and more likely to be women. Doctors reporting more difficult patients were also more likely to report burnout.