ESCP Europe Alumni Magazine - n°138 - Septembre 2011 - 27

Business
The health care industry
By Dr Florian THILO [Executive MBA 10]

ere are some notes about the health care industry. Some disciplines are very important in this industry which is a diverse market and which offers many opportunities to do business. Dr Floiran THILO is working for the Charité Clinics in Berlin and gives some details.

Hospital Management

Entrepreneurship & Venture Capital

To motivate

people to work as a team, issues have to be framed in terms of their underlying value system: a passion to alleviate human suffering.

An example for entrepreneurship in health care is the Charité Entrepreneurship Summit in Berlin. It is an international forum for entrepreneurial researchers and clinicians in biomedicine, medical technology and other healthcare fields, successful founders, legal and intellectual property experts, potential investors, and possible partners.

Is it really harder for a medical person to run a hospital than for a non-medical person, since medical people have strongly held beliefs about medicine, as Paul Levy, who took over the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, when it was in deep financial distress, claims? To motivate people to work as a team, issues have to be framed in terms of their underlying value system: a passion to alleviate human suffering. But how to judge your work in the absence of a simple metric like profitability?

Strategy

Information technology

Information technology in health care is cause and solution to the phenomenon of big data. Techniques for dealing with this Everest of data represent critical skills.

Marketing

Research data indicate that whole economy benefits if more people undergo colon cancer prevention. How to get more people undergo endoscopy for cancer prevention? A pharmaceutical firm wants to increase profits. How to gain physicians acceptance for the new drug just developed? You are the head of a hospital in Berlin, Germany with its more than 50 hospitals located in a densely populated area. How would you acquire and retain patients?

Cost Accounting

Porter and Kaplan set out to bring modern cost accounting to health care. How are costs aggregated? If expenses incurred by discrete services are simple to measure, how to measure the full cost of treating a patient’s problem? It’s not the cost of running a dialysis unit which matters, but the cost of treating renal failure. How are costs allocated in health care delivery? In treating patients, some costs are direct costs, e.g. the costs for a specific drug, but there are also costs of utilizing shared resources, e.g. facilities. A way to allocate these costs is provided by (time-driven) activity-based costing.

Strategy in the health care industry has to take the macro-environment into account. Regarding the political sphere, incentives should be expected to foster outpatient rather than inpatient treatment, which always has to deal with greater costs of facility management. From an economical perspective, the common European market will introduce cross-border health-care. In the social sphere, the aging of the baby-boomer generation implies a demographic change. An increasing percentage of patients over 60 years of age will require relatively more often inpatient than outpatient treatment, thereby at least partially counterbalancing the trend towards outpatient care. In less indebted countries there is an increased willingness of people to fund privately disease prevention and wellness offers. Health literacy, fostered by school and webbased programs is increasing. In the technological sphere, new forms of ambulatory care are implemented, like integrated care and community health centers. Although there is a trend to rank medical services in the internet, the impact of those rankings on e.g. the decision of the patient which hospital to attend is questionable. E-health will be a major issue in the short run. In respect to the environmental sphere, new communicable disease patterns are expected through climate change. In the legal sphere, with respect to health insurances, there is a trend to pay-for-performance instead of fee-for-service. l

ESCP Europe Magazine N° 138 - Septembre 2011

Table des matières de la publication ESCP Europe Alumni Magazine - n°138 - Septembre 2011

Couverture
Zapping
Sommaire
Editorial
Personnalité du mois - Alain MISSOFFE (90) : Porté par l'innovation
Focus - Big Bang dans la santé
Itinéraires
Entretiens - Santé/pharmaceutique, Audit, Entrepreneuriat, Agroalimentaire
Vie du réseau
Carrière - Les dessous de la chasse de tête
Voyages - Où allons-nous nous installer ?
A lire - Vos publications
École
Fondation - Financements 2011 : une action renforcée
Vie étudiante - Bienvenue à bord de l'Orient ESCPress

ESCP Europe Alumni Magazine - n°138 - Septembre 2011