Background
- Poorer countries lack essential healthcare (HC) infrastructure.
- Healthcare (HC) organizations critiqued about equity of access to HC.
- Management and leadership systems often hinder/facilitate an organization’s ability to operate in the international marketplace.
Goals
This paper seeks to examine key leadership and management systems that affect ability to work internationally:
- Post-Modern HC;
- International HC Markets;
- Challenges of working in international HC;
- Leadership concerns.
Post-Modern Health Care
- Medicine is curative, but should be preventive:
- Adults getting sicker more often than before.
- HC programs should focus on cost-effectiveness and resource management.
- Information technology (IT) expands capabilities:
- Facilitates telemedicine, better quality of care.
- Large fixed cost to undertake IT improvements.
International HC Markets
- Medical Tourism:
- People travelling, often internationally, to get better and/or cheaper medical care;
- $100b in 2012 globally.
- Organ Markets:
- Streamlining, market-based solutions for 20 people who die each day waiting for an organ.
- Profitability:
- HC organizations could invest in other industries to make profits.
- Ex: American hospitals overcharge, provide low quality care to make profits.
- Credit Markets:
- Tightening credit markets slow investment from U.S. partners to global healthcare projects.
- But demonstrable, profitable global HC projects could be a worthwhile investment.
- HC organizations could invest in other industries to make profits.
Challenges of working in Int’l H.C.
- Multiculturalism:
- Globalization has people from different backgrounds integrating → language barriers, literacy, cultural competency needs in HC settings.
- Black Market organ trafficking:
- Lack of reliable payment systems;
- Ethics of organ procurement.
- Medical Ethics:
- Medical providers uphold ethical code, but providers are still subjective.
- Standards may be more idiosyncratic than standard.
Leadership
- Problem: Current status of credit crunch.
- Layoffs and cost-cutting procedures to remain profitable.
- Solution: Need strong leadership to inspire optimism into an organization.
- This affects employee morale.
- Provides clear, strategic plans for how to adapt to global credit crunch.
Conclusions
- Highlighted issues that affect global HC:
- History of Medicine: post-modern, preventive medicine;
- Globalization of patients and providers:
- Cultural competency of providers;
- Important considerations of implementation of medical ethical standards among diverse providers.
- Globalization of materials and services:
- E.g., organ trafficking and medical tourism.
- Global markets affect investments and concerns about profitability.
