A new prescription

Need for change

There was more that needed to be changed in China's hospitals than just the updating of the hardware and technology. There were serious issues of insufficient and misdirected investment, which I could not solve on a large scale, but there were also big improvements that could be made by upgrading the management, service model and the philosophy that surrounded the delivery of patient care.

I could think of no better way to encourage change in this area than to model it, and at the same time provide a service to the growing international community who, like my small but growing family, still traveled out of China for any kind of serious healthcare need.

When we developed a business plan for a clinic and hospital facility to serve the international community and whatever segment of the Chinese population may ever be able to pay for private premium services, it turned out to be not only a great opportunity to demonstrate a different approach to healthcare, but also a very solid business proposition, with the possibility of replication if it succeeded.

'It can't be done'

We started approaching various officials in the Ministry of Health with this idea in the early 1990s, but the suggestion of private, for-profit healthcare in a socialist country was one that was mostly dismissed as a non-sequitur and a non-starter.

The concept, we were told, "could not be". We were either politely dismissed or summarily dismissed, until we met the foresighted leadership of the Academy of Medical Sciences, who helped us to make the case "from the inside" to the highest levels of the Ministry of Health.

We explained that having such a facility was an opportunity to examine approaches to healthcare gleaned from abroad and to see how it played out right here on Chinese soil.

Besides, we were only proposing a very small facility and at the time the officials took comfort that we would primarily be treating foreigners and, in fact, the existence of such a facility would prove a comfort to foreign tourists, investors and others considering traveling to Beijing or taking up temporary residence there.

We had been taking scores of delegations of Chinese public health officials and public hospital executives to the US each year to see for themselves some of the American palaces of modern healthcare.