A 21st Century Hospital…in Thailand

By Steve Searfoss

Fast Company has an interesting profile of Bumrungrad Hospital in Bangkok, Thailand. Bumrungrad is one of the top hospitals in the world catering to medical tourists. In 2006 Bumrungrad Hospital provided medical care for 430,000 international patients. The hospital is state-of-the-art:

A journey to Bumrungrad is hardly a descent into some third-world medical hell…Administrators have spent the past 15 years acquiring state-of-the-art technology, adding beds, and wooing Thai doctors abroad to come home. Bumrungrad replaced its paper records seven years ago with a homegrown, all-digital system, an upgrade U.S. hospitals have struggled with for years, despite the assistance of giants like Cerner, Siemens, and General Electric. (Replacing prescription pads with tablet PCs is harder than you’d think, which might explain why last year Microsoft bought the company that designed Bumrungrad’s software…

The hospital’s outpatient clinic is more stylish than the bar at my five-star hotel. Instead of waitresses, some two dozen nurses tend to a polyglot mix of patients. Arrivals from Asia or the Middle East have separate floors to make them feel at home. There’s an in-house travel agency offering visa extensions in case they suddenly need to stay. Modernizing late offered Bumrungrad a chance to leapfrog the competition and build the world’s first truly global hospital.

Bumrungrad is just one example of the crop of hospitals that have recently sprung up in places like India, Singapore, Costa Rica and Argentina that are specifically oriented to the medical travel market. And because in many cases these hospitals are new, they’re able to bypass many of the of the problems old hospitals face. As the article points out, there are hospitals in places like Thailand that are far more hi-tech and streamlined than hospitals in the US. I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft makes a big move into the medical records market in the next couple of years–using the technology first developed at Bumrungrad!

American healthcare is over-priced and inefficient. American patients are clearly overpaying for medical services. Consider a study by McKinsey consulting cited in the Fast Company article:

Some economists have hailed our extreme health-care spending as the central pillar of a postglobalization economy built around services. In their view, hospitals and their support systems of doctors, administrators, and insurers have been, and will continue to be, the greatest creators of domestic jobs this century — nearly 2 million so far — especially in the Rust Belt and other areas hit hard by manufacturing’s migrations. Yet when McKinsey consultants dug into health-care costs last year, a research team concluded there were no real incentives for either hospitals or consumers to think hard about the ultimate price of treatment. Even adjusting for our higher per capita incomes, we’re still overpaying by $477 billion a year, McKinsey concluded. At the same time, the United States ranks just 37th in the World Health Organization’s list of the world’s best health systems — behind such medical hubs as Singapore and Costa Rica, and only 10 spots ahead of Thailand.

One of the biggest shifts that will take place as medical travel picks up speed is a psychological shift in the mind of the American patient/consumer. Right now most Americans believe the quality of the healthcare they receive is tied to how much the spend. The more you spend, the thinking goes, the better the care you’re receiving. But this is not the case.

The American consumer aggressively shops around for just about any other purchase: not just cars, homes and big-ticket electronics but also professional services like tax-preparers, real estate agents and lawyers. What matters is getting the best deal, i.e. the right mix of quality and cost. As medical travel expands the options available to American patients/consumers they will begin to treat healthcare as something you can also aggressively shop around for, knowing that quality care is not always tied to the highest price.