Samantha Collier, MD, senior vice president and chief medical officer for HealthGrades, discusses value-based purchasing and how it could affect healthcare.
The Boston Marathon attracts thousands of runners from all over the world every year. Monday’s race was no different. My starting-line neighbors included a nice couple from Utah, a fast-looking Swede, a Canadian decked out in maple leafs down to her socks, and about 30 runners waving Japanese flags.
As I looked around at all these travelers, I couldn’t help but wonder why someone would travel—from Japan no less—to run 26.2 miles? The only thing worse than the run itself would be boarding an airplane for home at the end of the day or sleeping in a hotel bed. “It’s so inconvenient,” I thought. “It would be like traveling to Thailand for heart surgery.” Oh, wait.
This month’s Fast Company magazine features the world-famous Bumrungrad International, a posh, high-tech 554-bed hospital in Bangkok. Between 2001 and 2003, foreign patients at Bumrungrad more than doubled to 430,000, and, according to the article, the majority of the hospital’s revenue is generated by overseas patients.
Patients travel to Bumrungrad because it offers brand-new facilities, all digital records, and treatments, like stem cell therapy, that aren’t available in the U.S. Even open heart surgery has been replaced by a better, quicker, and safer procedure.
Experts predict “medical tourism,” a seemingly crazy idea for retired bargain hunters, will soon become “globalized healthcare.” It won’t just be for the adventurous or the uninsured; it will be for everyone.
This week’s news supports those predictions. South Carolina-based Companion Global Healthcare added three Singapore hospitals to its network, making international care an option for more than one million members of Blue Cross Blue Shield and BlueChoice HealthPlan of South Carolina.
If you’re a senior leader at an American-based hospital, the news that global healthcare is becoming more accessible should make you worry.
Convenience, after all, is your core strength. International hospitals, no matter how good they get, won’t ever be “home.” And for a lot of patients, the promise of newer hospitals and expanded treatment options doesn’t compare with the convenience and familiarity of their local hospitals.
So, as international care becomes more accessible, it’s more important than ever for leaders of American hospitals to make sure their facilities really are convenient. Scheduling appointments and accessing test results must be faster and easier than boarding a plane to Thailand. Appointments must be available in a reasonable timeframe. Doctors must return calls and e-mails (they do at Bumrungrad). And safety, good customer service, and transparency must be guaranteed.
As CEOs increasingly spend their time focused on high-level strategic plans, they’d be wise to pay attention to their hospitals’ day-to-day details and how they affect convenience. Because, while you’re adding service lines to compete with your competitors across town, hospitals across the world are getting patients in and out faster, marketing to patients better, and, now, making it easier to pay. Like traveling to run the Boston Marathon, flying to Thailand for healthcare suddenly seems a lot less crazy.
Molly Rowe is leadership editor with HealthLeaders magazine. She can be reached at mrowe@healthleadersmedia.com.
House Republicans have lined up with Democrats to brush aside a threatened White House veto and approve a one-year moratorium on a series of Bush administration restrictions on how states spend federal Medicaid money. The moratorium passed by a vote of 349-62, about 75 votes more than the two-thirds majority needed to override a veto. The Bush adiminstration says the restrictions are needed to rectify waste and abuse. Supporters of the moratorium say the new regulations would shift too many costs to the states and the poor.
While most Lasik eye surgery recipients walk away with crisper vision, not everyone's a good candidate. An unlucky few do suffer life-changing side effects: poor vision, painful dry eyes, glare or problems seeing at night. Beginning with a public hearing, the FDA is starting a new effort to determine if warnings about Lasik eye surgery's risks are appropriate. The agency also is pairing with eye surgeons for a study expected to enroll hundreds of Lasik patients to better understand who has bad outcomes and exactly what their complaints are.
Michigan Sen. Tom George, chair of the committee examining proposed changes to Michigan's individual insurance market, attempted to broker compromises by asking that only policies that have the greatest support and that will benefit consumers the most be adopted. George favors shelving many of the proposals sought either by Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan or members of his own committee to manage the state's growing individual insurance market.
The fight centers on insurance plans held by about 322,000 Michiganders, a growing number of whom are forced to buy their own insurance as they lose jobs or as employers drop workplace benefits.
Akron (OH) General Medical Center is expanding its outpatient center in Stow, OH, and considering adding inpatient services at its Summit County facility. Construction of a $7.6 million addition to the Akron General Health and Wellness Center-North will begin in summer 2008. The four-story, 42,000-square-foot addition will house cardiac testing and rehabilitation, neurology, a vision center, physician offices, pulmonary testing, a restaurant, a pharmacy and
other yet-to-be-determined stores.
Union County, NC, Commissioners have renewed the county's lease with Carolinas Medical Center-Union and extended the agreement until 2048. Under the new lease, the hospital will pay the county $2.75 million rent per year, and a one-time payment of $25 million. With the extended lease, CMC officials say they will be able to add interventional cardiology services, more cancer care, Level III trauma services, and expand the women's health and emergency departments.
Birmingham, AL-based Medical Properties Trust Inc. has completed the acquisition of ten hospitals and wellness centers as part of a previously announced $168 million transaction with California-based HCP Inc. The acquisitions are part of a broader $371 million deal between Medical Properties Trust and HCP that involves 21 healthcare facilities.
High-tech emergency departments, staffed with doctors and nurses but often miles from a hospital, are increasing rapidly nationwide. In addition to convenience for patients, these stand-alone ERs can ease overcrowding in nearby hospitals. But critics question their limited services, their ability to decrease the overall burden for area hospitals and their impact on healthcare spending. The number of such facilities owned by hospitals or entrepreneurial doctors grew 23% from 2005 to 2006, according to the American Hospital Association. Currently, about a dozen are opening or in the planning stages in states such as Florida, Minnesota and Texas.
Specialists have abandoned emergency rooms in droves, and their exodus is both a cause and a result of the backlogs that plague California hospital emergency rooms. A 2006 survey by the American College of Emergency Physicians found that 73% of emergency departments in the United States had inadequate on-call coverage by specialist physicians. One reason for the flight of specialists from emergency rooms is the surge of patients who have no medical insurance or who use Medi-Cal, which pays some of the lowest rates in the country.
