http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/5676.html
Q: There's an interesting phenomenon going on, and that's basically outsourcing
fairly complex surgeries to India for much cheaper prices. Does this actually
pose a threat to the institutionalized health care system at some point?
A: Not yet. I have 3 student teams who focused on this, and their analysis
was that employers are very worried about sending their employees to India, so
they're unlikely to ask their insurers to offer India or Thailand as an option.
It's the human resource person, not the CEO, making this decision. So this poor
human resource person says, "Oh my God, if I have an insurance policy that says
you can go to Thailand or India for surgery, and something goes wrong, I'm
going to be on the front page of The New York Times for outsourcing surgery."
If you can't get the employers to buy in, the insurers are not going to do it
independently.
On the other hand, I'm sure it's going to happen.
There are four big hospital companies in India, and I've talked with their
CEOs, with these teams of students. They're very focused on this market. And
one of the things they're all doing is getting accredited, so that the fear
that they don't meet the standards of U.S. hospitals will be minimized. Of
course, the accreditation agency is a creature of the hospital system, so how
much protection do you really get from that? But they will have the same kind
of accreditation as the American hospitals.
Some of them have a fabulous strategy, and that is they're very specialized.
Rather than build a 1,000-bed hospital, they have hub-and-spoke systems. Hub is
for trauma, and spoke are specialized hospitals that deal with specialized
needs. They have a fundamentally different delivery system, and the reason they
can have it is they're not dealing with the status quo that mashes down every
kind of innovation.
Umesh Sharma
Washington D.C.
1-202-215-4328 [Cell]
Ed.M. - International Education Policy
Harvard Graduate School of Education,
Harvard University,
Class of 2005
http://www.uknow.gse.harvard.edu/index.html (Edu info)
http://hbswk.hbs.edu/ (Management Info)
www.gse.harvard.edu/iep (where the above 2 are used )
http://jaipurschool.bihu.in/
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