NuWire Inc. has selected its "Top Five Medical Tourism Destinations," which the company says present the most attractive opportunities for medical tourists and foreign investors. The destinations were selected based on quality and affordability of care, as well as receptiveness to foreign investment. NuWire notes that medical staffs in the countries chosen are largely English-speaking, and thus language barriers do not pose a major obstacle for foreign patients.
One of the India's top health officials calls medical tourism a "waste of resources" if the money earned by private hospitals is not used to treat the poor. "I am not very keen on medical tourism," said Health Secretary Naresh Dayal. "It's a wastage of resources that I think should be utilized to better the health condition of our own people." Statistics show India's medical tourism market is growing and is expected to become a $2 billion a year business opportunity by 2012.
When I talk to executives at leading healthcare organizations that have recently made the strategic move into global healthcare, they stress the importance of getting their C-suite team on the ground as quickly as possible. The idea is a simple one: that a team of experienced leaders with varied disciplines can influence change and quality improvement quicker than a heavy-handed CEO on his own.
And yet I hear that many healthcare leadership teams continue to struggle with this concept. In far too many hospitals, the CEO doesn't just have the final say on strategic decisions--he has the only say. This is a key problem for global hospitals that face numerous challenges and opportunities: finding the golden mean of a CEO who is involved intimately in the growth of the organization, but not required in all organizational decisions.
Some of the organizations that have developed effective systems are among those that have submitted entries to our HealthLeaders Media Top Leadership Teams in Healthcare program. In their written entries, leaders tell us their stories of winning teamwork, and the best stories over the five years of the program are of those organizations that overcame immense obstacles because they had few barriers between key leaders.
To attain dynamic leadership teams, some global health systems are aligning with the top names in healthcare--Cleveland Clinic, Johns Hopkins, and University of Pittsburgh, to name a few--but this trend doesn't mean that top leadership teams cannot come from within. The Top Leadership Teams program has taught us that the qualities of effective teamwork are not exclusive to well-heeled organizations. In fact, some our best stories over the years have come from the leaders at small hospitals and medical groups that took on ambitious goals.
This year's Top Leadership Teams program is especially exciting for me because we have expanded our categories to include global hospitals and health systems. I recently spoke about the global category with Maureen Potter, vice president of International Services for HCPro, Inc., who is coordinating the judging of global entries. She says the judges are looking for organizations that develop through leadership collaboration and have no tolerance for silos.
Global hospitals are expected to see continual growth, with some forecasting that the medical travel industry will reach $50 billion (US) by 2010. But for CEOs of these organizations to be effective, they need the full complement of leaders supporting them.
If you have a good story of teamwork, I encourage you to share it with us. Who knows, maybe you'll be our first global winner of the Top Leadership Teams program. The deadline for global entries has been extended to April 4, 2008, so you still have time. Find out more about the program at www.topleadershipteams.net.
Ha! I got you with an April Fools' headline, now, didn't I? I just couldn't resist an age-old media tradition and use today as the basis for some outlandish humor. Even some otherwise serious publications get in on the act. Do you recall Sidd Finch, the pitcher who could throw a 168-mile-per-hour fastball? Sports Illustrated parlayed Finch into a national sensation in the 1980s. And some decades earlier, the stodgy New York Times ran a photo of a man flying by his own lung power.
What better day than today to join in the merriment with a little IT humor? After all, my computer likes to play April Fools' jokes year-round. It played one just the other day, when I was furiously pounding out e-mails to prospective sources (no, we don't make up those names, unlike the New York Times, which sometimes gets fooled by its own reporters).
Suddenly, in the midst of typing, all my words started coming out like this: Each*word*had*a*funny*symbol*following*it.*Same*for*the*paragraphs. Now that makes the messages a bit hard to read. Not one to burden tech support with such trivial issues, I decided to tackle the problem myself. It had happened once before, only I could not remember either what caused the problem (could 'user error' be in play here?) or how to fix it. So I turned to the Help function on Outlook. After typing in half a dozen key words to define the problem, I finally hit the jackpot. There it was, in black and white, "show or hide formatting marks."
I figured I had it made, and was on my way to typing without all those annoying symbols. Ah, if only computer life were so easy. Call me dumb, but I had those step-by-step instructions right in front of me, and still couldn't figure it out! Turns out my tool bar configuration is not quite the same as the one on the built-in help desk. Finally, after going through some pull-down menus, I was able to locate the answer. Funny thing is, I still don't have the slightest clue how I even managed to turn on those marks in the first place.
Like Yogi Berra said, that was déjà vu all over again. You see, while filing copy from the HIMSS show this past February, my typing inexplicably turned to mush. Somehow, while furiously pounding out my story, I managed to turn on the hidden numbers keypad on my laptop. On this keypad, for example, the u = 4, i = 5, and o = 6. Thus, when I typed, "the CIO said," it came out as "the C56 sa5d." Now my editors here at HealthLeaders give me remarkable leeway, but I knew that they would draw the line at this prose.
Not even the online help desk could help me with this one, so I toted my laptop into the HIMSS convention center, figuring that among 30,000 IT experts, one of them could solve the problem. Several people I approached said they didn't know how to help me, but gave me that quizzical look that suggested they really thought I needed a vacation. Luckily I ran into Neil Versel, the IT blogger who is more technically inclined than I. He knew right away that I had turned on my "numbers lock," and demonstrated the three keys that needed to be depressed--simultaneously--to let my keyboard return to sanity.
What is it about computers that they lend themselves to such shenanigans? Can you imagine what a physician would do if, suddenly, while typing his patient note, he saw a screen half full of numbers? Or what a nurse would do if, while looking up a patient history, hit the submit button and got an error message? Or envision the CFO diligently punching in numbers, when suddenly the screen freezes. I bet they would not be writing lighthearted recollections about it when April 1 rolled around.
Has your computer played a joke on you lately? If so, send it along to me.
Children's Hospital of Wisconsin now uses a robotic cart called TUG to move equipment and supplies throughout the hospital. Doing so allows staff to concentrate on transporting patients more quickly, say hospital officials. In all, there are about 100 TUG units at institutions throughout the nation, say representatives from Aethon Corp., which manufactures the machine.
Annapolis, MD-based Anne Arundel Medical Center and Baltimore Washington Medical Center in Glen Burnie, MD, are in the midst of major expansions meant to meet growing demand by greatly increasing their capacity and offering new services. Both hospitals have also built flexibility into their expansions to prepare for additional growth. Some of the floors new towers at each of the hospitals will be empty shells ready to complete when the need arises.
Birmingham, AL, Mayor Larry Langford will announce an initiative to provide healthcare coverage to 5,000 uninsured city schoolchildren. He said the city would contribute $150,000 a year and an unnamed foundation would match the money. Langford said government has an obligation to help close the gap for children without access to healthcare.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's administration has moved to ban healthcare providers from billing patients for the cost of services above what their HMOs are willing to pay. The bills are the product of a protracted feud between insurers and healthcare providers, principally emergency room doctors, radiologists and anesthesiologists. Such doctors often work in hospitals but don't have contracts with the same health maintenance organizations that serve the hospitals. When the doctors believe the reimbursements they receive from insurers are too low, the providers send additional bills to patients for the difference.
A five-year, $1 billion taxpayer subsidy to help Pennsylvania doctors buy medical malpractice insurance has lapsed, and physicians will now have to pay higher premiums unless lawmakers break an impasse over expanding a state health insurance program. Gov. Ed Rendell supports a bill that would tie the future of the medical malpractice subsidy to approval of a $1 billion expansion of the health insurance program to cover an additional 220,000 state residents. Republicans who control the Senate, however, are critical of the health insurance provision.
Reviews by a New Jersey auditor have found wealthy people are enrolled in a state-run healthcare program for working poor families, and criminal investigators are examining another state health program for the poor. Audits found people earning as much as $295,000 are enrolled in a program designed to help low-income working parents receive healthcare. They also found the state failing to properly oversee medical equipment purchases.
