The Implications of the Accredited Healthcare Corporations

ABSTRACT

American medical schools and hospitals have entered an age in which they are now not only accepting patients and researchers from abroad, but they are also exporting their medical schools and hospitals to foreign countries. Cornell University, for instance, was entrusted by the government of Quatar with the administration of its medical school and, from October of 2002, the university has begun a medical education program in the capital city of Doha. In another example, the UAE has hired Harvard University as the consultant for its project to construct the Dubai Healthcare City, a world-class healthcare cluster. In contrast to this, the management of Japanese medical schools and hospitals is far below the global standard, and many management resources are currently being wasted.

The following two steps should be followed in order to make Japanese healthcare competitive at the forefront of the global industry : first the formation of hospital groups (IHNs) within each wide area healthcare market and second, a business alliance between such a group and the medical schools in the area. Such an alliance would create the business infrastructure needed to eliminate redundant investments and generate the operational mass needed to attract patients, human resources, and funds from around the world. A concrete example of this model can be seen in Missouri, where a business alliance is developing between the Washington University Medical Department and BJC Healthcare, a large community based non-profit IHN.

In order to attain international competitiveness while still maintaining the non-profit ethos, it is necessary that public hospitals, beginning with local hospitals, be at the center of these IHNs in each wide area healthcare market. However, depending on the region, there are also privately run hospitals that one could say are even more non-profit oriented and more beneficial to the public than the public hospitals themselves. If these forward thinking hospitals are also included in the generation of Japanese IHNs, it is possible to achieve far-reaching reform in the country's system for healthcare provision.

The establishment of the accredited healthcare corporations by the Health, Labor and Welfare Ministry in December of last year can be seen as a concrete policy meant to carry forward this type of reform. With the functionality of a holding company, healthcare corporations can begin to take advantage of previously impracticable cooperative activities such as joint purchases, IT investments on the level of the wide area healthcare market, and the pooling of human resources. From this, it is very likely that genuine integration will proceed. The region that takes the leadership in initiating such integrated hospital groups will become capable of exchanging technologies and personnel with the top rated IHNs in the US, and will thus have the potential to move to the top of their industry.