Prepare for the Economic Recovery with a Global Healthcare Strategy

Companies can't just focus on cutting costs...your competitors are already thinking about the next expansion.

How many times have you been exhorted to 'think out side the box.' After this 'most recent discomfort' of the economic cycle has churned through, there may be even more boxes to think about.

Vijay Govindaragan at Tuck School of Business advocates thinking about two more boxes of innovation. The first box we are all familiar with: sales margins go down, so you cut costs. This is the box that most everyone is focusing on now. The problem with this tunnel vision is that expansion always follows recession...and lasts longer and is more robust than the recession.

But the recession we are in has changed the competitive landscape - there are new winners and new losers. So during the recession is the best time to prepare for the expansion, as assets and talent are cheaper and more available.

The second box deals with two types of innovation - adjacency innovation, which is a little less risky because you are innovating in a business area adjacent to your existing core business, and breakout innovation, where you go multiple steps outside your core business. During a recession, when serious mistakes cannot be made, breakout innovations tend to ignored, even though the high risk may result in a high reward.

The third box is essentially creating your company's future in 2025. But while you may not actually plan for the year 2025, you can prepare for it.

If your executive staff is not quite ready for gaining consensus on the big, nonlinear shifts that will impact the business, why not get some practice and consider implementing an adjacency innovation in box number two?

Implementing a global healthcare option plan that co-exists with existing healthcare benefits may be one of the highest return/low risk programs for corporate HR to consider. Consider the upside potential of a relationship with premier Indian super specialty hospitals:

• As a self insured corporation, you already have the necessary infrastructure to manage healthcare benefits
• It is doubtful that you are conveniently located near a US center of healthcare excellence. Your employees will now have access to 'world class' medical outcomes at exceptional, high practice volume healthcare facilities.
  
• Offering India as an option for a select number of very expensive orthopedic, cardiovascular, bariatric and bone marrow transplant will significantly reduce healthcare benefit costs
  
• Your company's willingness to import global healthcare competition can be a wake up call for the local hospitals to reconsider their pricing models...just as global competition has forced you to do for many, many years
• After the first employee/patient returns, word-of-mouth marketing of the experience typically drives acceptance of the program at a surprising rate.

So when the expansion does roll around, why not take some innovative steps to offer higher value, lower costs benefits than your competitors...so you can remain on the winners list.

Tort Standards Pose a Litigation Risk for Innovation in US Hospitals

Part Eight/Tort law locks US hospitals in to expensive and conventional practices and exposes potential disruptive innovators to liability. Don't expect innovation in US healthcare until negligence law is overhauled.

In addition to the burdens of having no way to fund innovation in US hospitals, there is also the ever present threat that any innovation may be labeled a deviation from the 'community standard.' This vulnerability exposes would-be innovators to liability that does not threaten incumbent providers, who abide by a strict status quo.

And amazingly, even though certain doctrines in negligence law have been known to hold providers liable when when courts find the community standard too low, no such doctrine allows providers to escape liability by arguing that a widely held community standard is too high.

US medical malpractice law penalizes innovation that cannot match the quality of the current paradigm, even if the innovation offers cost advantages and even if the innovation's quality improves over time. Initial offerings that do not meet a community standard will be deemed malpractice.

An Incredible Journey in Medical Tourism - Our Pioneering Work is Recognized in Amitabh Kant's New Book

Perseverance furthers...we join industrialist Ratan Tata in launching this outstanding publication

Amitabh Kant just published an excellent book "Branding India - Incredible journey." India is a magnificently diverse country- with twenty-eight states, seven union territories, eighteen official languages and 1.12 billion people. In this complex and massive exercise, Amitabh Kant, former joint secretary in the ministry of tourism, and his colleagues cutting across various government departments achieved a global milestone as they put India on the World Tourism Map with their ‘Incredible India’ campaign.

Here is an excerpt highlighting my visit to India in 2007 as a guest speaker at the Indian Healthcare Summit in New Delhi:

"Paradigm Shift

In reality, there is a paradigm shift taking place and the primary healthcare doctors have only just begun to realize that there is a good quality treatment available outside the US. In these formative years, it will require professionals like Tom Keesling (founder and President of IndUShealth, USA) to act as a facilitator and catalyst. Keesling, whom I met at the Indian Health Summit in Delhi in 2007, told me that economics makes it a highly attractive option to send patients from the US to India. According to his calculation, the savings are of almost US$ 1000 per flying hour - almost US$30,000 for the thirty-hour return flying time from the US to India and back. According to him, the economics are obvious to chief financial officers (CFOs) but it is important to convince CEOs that the patients about the quality of healthcare in India being at par with the best in the US.

Keesling is recognized as a pioneer in making safe and affordable healthcare available to individuals and companies in the US. Speaking at the healthcare summit, Keesling said that more than incurring expenditure on promotion and marketing, it is essential that Indian hospitals have independent studies on medical outcomes of patients and get them regularly published in international journals to establish that they can match the world's best - Mayo and Johns Hopkins. The approach has to be similar to that of Indian hotels, which figure prominently amongst the finest in the world. Indian hospitals like Max, Escorts, Apollo and Wockhardt and Artemis (a phenomenal new hospital in Gurgaon) need to figure in the list of the best hospitals in terms of their medical performance. This will give them enhanced credibility for referral purposes. Dr Naresh Trehan, who has aggressively driven the Indian Helath Care Foundation, aims to achieve this excellence through the establishment of his Medicity in Gurgaon."

The conference that Amitabh references featured a surprise visit by His Holiness Dalai Lama that occurred just before my presentation. His quote, "...less prayer, less meditation...more actions!" has certainly been echoed in our efforts to introduce the outstanding advantages of Indian healthcare to American patients and corporations.

As I think back to the seemingly random path from Indiana, to reading the Bhagavad Gita during my study of Eastern philosophy in college, to the ten years of hospital CEO experience...and yet another chapter of healthcare reform... I find myself referring to one of my favorite quotes from Rajesh Rao, co-founder of IndUShealth,

"there is no such thing as luck, only destiny"