A Final Post from Me, In a Continuing Story

September 5th, 2014|Uncategorized|By

by JHI Staff on September 5, 2014

Steve ThompsonWelcome to my farewell blog post. After 15 years at Johns Hopkins Medicine International, I’m about to hand over the reins, as all leaders eventually must.

I had always imagined that this would be a time of sharply mixed feelings. But it isn’t turning out that way. It feels more like the start of an exciting new chapter—not just for me, but more importantly for JHI, as the organization works to bolster its position as a successful pioneer in the field of global collaborative health care.

Who would have thought all those years ago when we started JHI that we’d make it this far? We knew what we hoped to do: establish close working relationships with medical centers, health ministries and investors around the world so that we could help improve the quality, safety and access to a broad spectrum of advanced medical care for many populations.

But knowing where you want to be and recognizing what path to take to get there are two different things. There was so much we didn’t know—things that no one in the world knew—such as what health care consumers in different regions wanted, what sort of finance and investment approaches would fly, what it would take to facilitate effective knowledge transfer, how transnational staffing needs might be met, what sort of organization could best address these needs, and much more.

It’s tempting to look back now and claim we knew what we were doing as we tackled and overcame these challenges. But the truth is we often felt we had little idea what we were doing, and when we did think we knew what we were doing, we often were wrong. We took plenty of risks and made hundreds of mistakes.

But thanks to the commitment of Johns Hopkins Medicine to an international mission, to the determination of our collaborators worldwide to making progress, and to a talented and dedicated group of personnel here at JHI, we kept at it. We learned from our mistakes, and we started to rack up our first successes, and then more and bigger successes.

Now our collaborations range across some 20 countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, Africa, the Middle East and North America—among them, the most ambitious health care projects ever undertaken in those parts of the world. We see a constant flow of our clinician-leader colleagues at Johns Hopkins Medicine to these many collaborations, matched by a flow of clinicians from our collaborators to Baltimore for observerships, seminars and training. And we are welcoming unprecedented numbers of patients with complex care needs from afar to our Baltimore and other U.S. hospitals, even as we help other countries build the health care systems they need to eventually meet all patients’ needs locally.

We have made a real contribution to health care globally. I know we here at JHI and all of Johns Hopkins Medicine have benefited from what our collaborators and international patients have shared with us, including their cultures, their experiences and insights, and their ability to challenge our preconceptions and to touch us with their unique perspectives. And we are thrilled and encouraged that other academic medical centers here in the U.S. and elsewhere are joining us in this international mission.

And yet I can also say with confidence that this effort is barely getting started. It is a nascent industry that is just now starting to attract a wide range of new players. The distribution around the globe of top-notch health care has been lopsided, and while the global collaborative health care industry is starting to work hard to pull everyone up to the same high bar, it has a long way to go.

Given the big improvements in health care now actively sought by so many less-fully industrialized countries, it’s not surprising that health care industry growth rates are on average around three times higher in that world than they are in the U.S. and Europe. I believe that reason alone will ensure that much of the real action in health care in the U.S. and Europe will be in global collaborative health care. We’ve seen that sort of explosive growth here at JHI, and there’s every reason to believe it will only continue to accelerate.

I’d be kidding myself to think that my absence here will interrupt that acceleration. I’m more of the mind that the new leadership will find new opportunities, and new ways of capitalizing on them, that will take JHI even further than I would have dared imagine. I’m proud of my contribution, but I’m more proud of the people at JHI and Johns Hopkins Medicine who have made everything happen, and who will continue to push the boundaries of this exciting young industry to the world’s benefit.

Moving forward, by the way, includes the continuation of this JHI blog, though it will be others here doing the posting. (I’ll be continuing my own blogging here.) I, for one, intend to follow those posts closely, and I hope you will, too.

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Global Collaborative Health Care Leadership

August 19th, 2014|Collaboration|By

by JHI Staff on August 19, 2014

Two hallmarks of the health care industry are complexity and change.

By complexity, I mean that health care involves many moving parts (clinical care, insurance, research, education, regulation), stakeholders (physicians, nurses, patients, community, government, payers, stockholders), and forms of risk and investment (building capacity, upgrading facilities, liability, partnerships and acquisitions).

And by change, I mean major transformation. U.S. health care costs are widely perceived as being out of control, outcomes need to be better, there are shortages of primary care physicians and of nurses, and some segments of the population don’t have good access to health care. To address these problems, the U.S. health care sector is looking at entirely new models of everything, from how we train and pay doctors, to how we deliver care to patients, to the ways in which hospitals are paid.

The challenges of complexity and change become amplified when the perspective shifts beyond the U.S. Because global collaborative health care efforts combine the work of partners from different nations, their complexity can increase with, for example, the need to meet regulations from other governments, to recruit staff from various parts of the world, and to blend significant cultural differences.

At the same time, managing change can be all the more daunting because the sources may be a mixture of local and global changes in health care, coming from many directions. For example, in the U.S. the government is in the process of playing a bigger role in paying for health care, and there’s an effort to increase access to health care while reducing dependence on advanced and more costly care. But in many countries the government already pays for everyone’s health care, and the challenge is to make more advanced care available, not less. In addition, many nations face rapid and unpredictable social, economic and political shifts.

It’s a lot to handle, and that makes leadership in this new field all the more critical—but not in the way many people might think. Given all the complexity, you might suppose an organization entering global collaborative health care needs a leader who can stay on top of all the different components and keep the many parts moving in sync. You do, of course, need all that—but you need managers to do most of it, not leaders.

Leaders have to step back from all the details to take the broader view. Where will the opportunities be in the coming years? What resources and affiliations will the organization need to take advantage of them? What are the risks of failure, and how can they be mitigated? Integrating answers to these difficult questions into a vision that will guide the organization is the key challenge facing leaders.

There is a severe lack of this sort of groundbreaking leadership right now in global collaborative health care. That’s not a criticism—the field is new, and there hasn’t yet been time and awareness enough to develop leadership. The proof of this shortage can be seen at a glance simply by noticing how few major health care organizations have made significant commitments to the field. At Johns Hopkins Medicine, we’ve seen only a few of our fellow major medical centers step up in any significant way so far, for example. Much the same is true among large health insurance providers and investment firms.

If more organizations are going to contribute to this important field, which is poised for enormous growth, then we’ll need more leaders to direct the charge. Developing those leaders is a real challenge, because conventional health care administration or MBA programs today aren’t necessarily sufficient for the task. We’ll need leaders who can grasp the special demands of both health care and international collaboration, and who can go beyond day-to-day management to set vision and direction.

This new breed of global collaborative health care leader will be able to create excitement and confidence in others, driving organizations forward into unfamiliar territory, armed with an ability to manage risk, and take advantage of opportunity. The beneficiaries will be not only the organizations that will thrive under these new leaders, but the world’s populations, as these collaborative efforts spread access to better, safer, more affordable care everywhere.

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Training Patients

August 6th, 2014|Health Care Jobs,Health Innovation,Patient Care,Policy|By

by JHI Staff on August 6, 2014

For the past century, health care has mostly been about hospital beds and doctors’ offices. This approach made sense, given that the biggest threat to health had been infection, and that medicine knew how to address cancer and heart disease only when cases became advanced enough to require hospitalization.

We’re in the midst of a dramatic change in that model of health care. Infection mortality today is less than a twentieth of what it was. That decline has contributed to much longer average lifespans. That also means that more than two-thirds of people today die of chronic diseases— cancer, heart disease, diabetes and Alzheimer’s.

We’ve made huge strides in our ability to treat these diseases in their advanced or acute stages. The potentially bigger breakthrough is our growing understanding of avoiding these diseases, and of slowing and even reversing their progress and impact when they do take hold. (Alzheimer’s has to a large extent been an exception so far, but advances seem to be on the horizon.)

It is this ability to prevent and manage these diseases as chronic conditions, rather than acute, that most experts believe holds the key to further improvements in lifespan and quality of life. It’s also the best way, experts say, to tame the high costs of health care—in the U.S., three-quarters of the well over $2 trillion dollars a year we spend on health care goes to fighting chronic disease.

Some aspects of chronic disease prevention and management will continue to take place in traditional health care settings. Physical exams in the doctor’s office will be at least as important as ever, as will some types of hospital- or clinic-based screening and diagnostic tools. And those who have non-acute forms of a chronic disease, or who are at high risk of one, may be under closer doctor’s care and on medications, to slow disease progress and avoid the need for acute care.

But when it comes to prevention, and even to management, of these diseases, much will happen outside of conventional health care delivery facilities. For one thing, the biggest component of avoiding or mitigating most chronic disease is getting patients to change their everyday behavior. According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion, about a third of the U.S. population is obese, a third doesn’t get the recommended minimum amount of daily exercise, a fifth smokes, and a third engages in binge drinking.

All these behaviors are risk factors for chronic disease. The toll they take on our health? According to the World Health Organization, eliminating them would prevent 80 percent or more of all heart disease, stroke, and type 2 diabetes, and more than 40 percent of incidences of cancer. The CDC reports that three-fifths of obese children aged 5–10 years already have one or more risk factors for heart disease, and more than a quarter of them have two or more factors. And the agency estimates the annual medical cost of obesity in the U.S. to be $147 billion, or $1,429 per year higher on average for an obese person than for a person of normal weight.

The U.S. health care system, boosted in large part by the Affordable Care Act, is trying to remake itself around the need to coach people into healthier behavior, and keep a closer eye on those patients at high risk of, or who suffer from, chronic disease. That means going beyond hospitals and physicians’ offices to workplaces, neighborhoods, and even the home. Tactics increasingly include behavioral education and coaching, email and phone outreach, home visits, and electronic remote and self-monitoring. Trust for America’s Health calculates that on average every dollar spent on community-based behavior-change programs returns more than five dollars in health care savings.

After a century and a half of focusing on training clinicians, health care education is now partly shifting its aim to training patients, because many patients can do much more to preserve their own health than physicians or state-of-the-art hospitals can.

We at Johns Hopkins Medicine International have been changing the ways in which we work with our collaborators around the world on large health care system projects. In the past, we mostly thought in terms of building, expanding and improving hospitals, and supporting the wider availability of specialty care, especially in countries that have a shortage of high-quality hospitals. We still largely focus on those efforts, but now we also help our collaborators examine ways to improve population health. Such efforts have for example figured prominently in our collaborations with Trinidad and Tobago, and with the hospitals we have worked with in the UAE.

Every population deserves access to high-quality, safe hospital care, and we’re proud to be working toward that goal. But we’re increasingly aware that these efforts are just one component of health. We’re working hard to address the others, and hopefully more of the population will join the effort to keep people from getting seriously ill enough to really need to go to a hospital.

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The Future of Health Care Globalization

July 18th, 2014|Health Innovation,Policy|By

by JHI Staff on July 18, 2014

Most of us have at least a rough sense of what globalization means when it comes to cars, movies, vegetables, and information technology. But what does it mean when it comes to health care?

A Google search on “health care” and “globalization” mostly leads to articles that focus on medical tourism, which is when patients travel—sometimes across the world—to receive treatments. When patients travel for care, sometimes at the urging of large employers or whoever is paying for the service, it’s typically to receive treatment at a discount from what it would cost near their homes, though sometimes it’s to receive treatments that aren’t available locally, or that in some way aren’t delivered as well.

But as I’ve written here in this blog and elsewhere, medical tourism isn’t the big trend it’s been anticipated to be, and it will likely become even less important. That’s because we’ll see the worldwide gaps in health care prices, availability and quality start to shrink, as countries with advanced health care systems grapple to control their costs, and other countries improve quality and access. The result is that more people will be able to get the treatment they need more locally at costs that aren’t terribly out of line with other places in the world. This is a very good thing, because people who need medical treatment shouldn’t have to add the burden of travel to their already challenging situations.

Also turning up on Google under search results for health care globalization, but in a distant second place, is the idea that physicians, nurses and technicians will move to other countries to work. That is, health care professionals are to some extent becoming exports via immigration or expatriation. That’s a trend that’s been going on for a long time, and will likely continue for the foreseeable future, given mismatches in various countries’ health care demands, labor costs, employment levels, and training availability, among other factors. But whether it’s a good representation of globalization is another question.

Health care globalization will ultimately be about the more fluid flow of services, expertise and information across borders. That particular interpretation of health care globalization is scarce among the Google search results. A small exception is the World Health Organization’s website, which while it more prominently cites medical tourism and immigrant/expat health care labor as examples of globalization in health care, also includes these three lines as defining the trend:

The increase in private companies, including foreign companies, which provide health services and health insurance schemes.

The use of new technologies, such as the Internet, to provide health services across borders and to remote regions within countries.

....Openness to foreign goods, services, ideas and policies, and people.

Buried in those few words is a world of opportunity to improve health care around the planet, and one that could go far beyond sending patients to other countries for hip replacements or importing nursing staff. Therein lies the future of health care globalization: Collaborations between private health care organizations, insurers, NGOs, government agencies, academic centers, investors and others, coming together across borders to sustainably expand and improve health care systems.

Those collaborations can involve the flow of experts who visit to help design and develop hospitals and clinical programs, of procedural and physical tools that enable improvements, of telemedicine that augments local capabilities, of private investment to support new projects, and of managers who can teach others how to keep things running smoothly. We at Johns Hopkins Medicine International have been helping to provide and orchestrate these sorts of collaborative services in dozens of major health care projects all over the world for two decades, and more and more of our fellow academic medical centers and other organizations are joining in.

Yes, we’re also involved in helping patients who travel internationally for treatment, and in bringing in staff who come from other countries to work at our hospitals and projects. Sure, that’s part of globalization. But health care globalization at its best will be about bringing a vast range of international resources to bear on comprehensive local solutions. It has been exciting for us at JHI to help pioneer that trend, and I look forward to watching it grow in the coming decade.

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A Global Slowdown in Health Care Spending? Not So Fast

July 16th, 2014|Health Economics,Policy|By

by JHI Staff on July 16, 2014

The Journal of the American Medical Association recently published a study entitled “The Global Slowdown in Health Care Spending Growth.” The study looks at spending data gathered in a report from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and observes the following about “excess health care spending growth,” or growth in health care spending that exceeds the growth of the economy:

In recent years, rates of excess health care spending in the United States and OECD have declined below their historical norms; in 2010 and 2011 (and 2012 for countries with available data), excess spending was either negligible or negative. The slowdown in health care spending growth has been a global phenomenon; in fact, US excess growth in 2010 and 2011 was slightly higher than average relative to other industrialized countries.

The article doesn’t specify which countries are included, other than to say it’s the OECD countries with data from 1980 to 2011. Apparently it relied on a list found in the OECD report. Excluding countries without data from 1980 to 2011, that leaves 23 countries—23 of the most industrialized, affluent countries in the world.

Because these 23 countries have long boasted extensive health care systems, and can with their affluent populations afford heavy infrastructure investment, they do of course constitute the lion’s share of health care spending in the world. Thus it’s perfectly accurate to say a slowdown in spending from these countries represents a global slowdown, because what these countries do will swamp whatever is happening elsewhere combined in terms of total spending levels.

But at the same time, calling the slowdown a global one is a bit misleading. It may be “global” in terms of total spent, but I suspect that if you looked at all countries around the world, and weighted spending growth by size of population covered rather than by absolute spending amounts, the results would be very different. (I wish I had the data at hand to make this calculation, but the availability of data is heavily biased toward the industrialized countries.)

In fact, I’d bet a more comprehensive, population-based look at global spending (that is, average percentage spending increase per capita) would reveal a global increase in health care spending. After all, that larger list of countries would include some pretty populous nations that have seen vigorous growth in health care investment in recent years, including China, India, Brazil, and in fact almost all of Asia and South America, where investment growth in health care (and infrastructure in general) has been strong. Many countries in Africa, too, have been investing. The great majority of countries in these regions are not on the list considered in the study—a pretty big group to leave out.

The world as a whole is seeing more and better health care. The most industrialized countries may be lagging in that growth in recent years, but that means the less- and more-recently industrialized worlds are working to close the health care gap. You’d expect a steeper growth curve for countries that have been relatively lacking in modern health care infrastructure, whereas mature systems like those found on the OECD list are more likely to take a breather from rapid growth, especially as they try to limit health care costs.

Accelerating that closing of the spending gap is the fact that global investment has been shifting to emerging and less-fully industrialized markets, as these countries build their infrastructures. What’s more, we’ve been seeing a mostly steady rise in democracy, larger middle classes, and better access to education and information in these markets. Many of these populations now for the first time can afford modern health care infrastructure, are aware of what they’ve been missing, and have the political clout to demand improvement. We’re seeing these trends in just about every less-fully industrialized region in the world.

None of this is to say the study was inaccurate, including in the way it used the term “global.” But I hope observers will avoid labeling health care trends that apply only to highly industrialized countries as “global” trends. It may be accurate to do so as a matter of numeric averages. But it tends to mask the large and important changes in health care taking place among a huge percentage of the planet’s population—a trend that should be celebrated, not obscured.

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Too Much Medicine? Not Necessarily

July 14th, 2014|Health Economics,Patient Care,Policy|By

by JHI Staff on July 14, 2014

A recent journal article examined the issue of “overmedicalizing,” or handling a normal human condition as if it were a disorder requiring medical treatment. Claims of overmedicalization have been made about several conditions. For example, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) may be a brain condition treatable with medications and therapy—or a label wrongly attached to a normal set of cognitive and personality traits. Aging and death are natural processes that call for little or no medical intervention—or ones that can be staved off or mitigated by treatment.

Some claims can seem reasonable and should give us pause, for example, people very near the end of their lives receiving aggressive treatment rather than palliative care. In other cases, we should be wary of the claim, because treatment can truly lengthen life span and raise the quality of life. As an example, consider the fact that through the 1980s and beyond, some loud voices insisted that AIDS was a syndrome caused by drug abuse, and not a viral condition that might be treatable.

Clearly this issue can be complex. Consider the role of culture in whether a situation might urgently call for medical intervention. In the U.S., for example, many would agree that a cancer drug capable of adding six months or so of high-quality life to a patient’s prognosis ought to be an essential treatment. But some Johns Hopkins Medicine oncology faculty who have spent time practicing at Johns Hopkins Singapore have been surprised to find that not all patients there feel the same. What is considered good medicine here in the U.S. might be considered overmedicalization in other cultures. We’ve learned to respect these sorts of differences, which we encounter all over the world.

People tend to speak of health care as if it necessarily looks at all patients’ problems as being candidates for medical treatments. Historically, that’s probably a fair claim—health care systems have indeed been biased toward treatment, and usually in hospitals and doctors’ offices. But that’s changing, and quickly. Increasingly, health care is spreading out from the hospital to the community and even the home, reaching people not just with medication and procedures but also with education and support services that promote healthier lifestyles and prevention. Health care wants to do more to keep patients from needing to be in hospital beds, or from even requiring any treatment or special care at all.

As that transformation to “the bedless hospital” continues, and medicine becomes as likely to provide emotional support, dietary advice and healthy-habit coaching as it does medication, concerns about overmedicalization will become less urgent. The question won’t be whether medicine should be involved in a problem, but rather what flavor of medicine should be involved.

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Health Care Communitarianism in Colombia

June 23rd, 2014|Uncategorized|By

by JHI Staff on June 23, 2014

FSFB

There is no one institutional path to becoming a provider of high-quality, safe, affordable health care. It’s not, for example, about private vs. public, or profit vs. non-profit. Rather, it’s about being mission-driven, structuring for sustainability, and building around local culture and needs. In our collaborations with health care providers, payers and government agencies around the world, we at Johns Hopkins Medicine International (JHI) have worked with different models for how care is paid for and delivered. We’ve seen that any model can succeed or struggle, depending on the context and implementation.

Actually, there’s one model we don’t often encounter in our global collaborations—the one we follow at Johns Hopkins Medicine. The model is that of the academic medical center, dedicated to providing not only top-notch care, but also medical education, and to advancing the state of medicine through research. Our model also involves a commitment to expanding the scope and accessibility of medicine everywhere through our work in public health and our efforts at JHI.

But one global collaborator of ours that follows much the same model is Fundación Santa Fe de Bogotá (FSFB), in Colombia. And, though much of what FSFB does is similar to what we do, the differences in regional context lead to some sharp contrasts.

For example, here in the U.S., Johns Hopkins Medicine is one of many fine academic medical centers. Though we strive to deliver the very best care to patients, we can’t claim that most patients who come here from Maryland, or from other parts of the U.S., don’t have several options for good medical care. But in the Bogotá region and to some extent in all of Colombia, FSFB is a unique institution, offering care and services that many in the region wouldn’t be able to get anywhere else. Unlike Johns Hopkins Medicine, FSFB can’t draw on the resources of a vast, longstanding, advanced medical infrastructure to grow and maintain its capabilities. Since its founding in 1972, FSFB has not merely reflected the progress of Colombia’s health sector; it has been instrumental in defining that progress.

Because JHI collaborates with FSFB, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to talk to that organization’s dynamic leader, Juan Pablo Uribe. I find it inspiring how seriously he and all the leadership of FSFB take the responsibility of advancing the state of medicine and health care in their region and country. Anyone who knows Dr. Uribe’s background would expect no less: A former World Bank senior manager focusing on health care, he held posts in Colombia as the vice minister of health and the national director of public health before taking the helm at FSFB.

For Dr. Uribe, FSFB’s role is more than just a health care mission: It’s a world view, one that he likes to refer to as “communitarianism.” That’s a term with some history in political and social movements and in philosophy, but the essence of what Dr. Uribe means by communitarianism is when local, private institutions become important not merely in providing useful services to the public, but in shaping the community.

That drive to impact the community in ways that do the most good is clear in many of FSFB’s efforts. It established a Community Health division that focuses on improving environmental health factors in Bogatá’s most vulnerable communities through education, training, social mobilization, direct intervention and policy. It established the Center for Studies and Health Research to advance medicine’s understanding of and ability to control infectious and other diseases that are a particular burden to the region, including malaria and dengue. It has helped design and implement systems for monitoring health outcomes for Colombia, and has been a pioneer in applying health economics and technology to bettering health care delivery. It has been continuously involved in forming local and national health policy, including the design of comprehensive health care plans.

Of course, FSFB’s commitment to improving health among those who most need it is best exemplified by the care it directly delivers. Its University Hospital was the first Bogotá-region hospital to receive Joint Commission International accreditation, and the second in Colombia.

FSFB has been at or near the forefront of virtually every one of the country’s medical advances for three decades, performing the first liver and cardiac transplants there, providing start-of-the-art imaging, radiosurgery and neonatal care capabilities, and establishing Colombia’s first emergency clinic and one of its first intensive care units. Its institutes of oncology and cardiovascular disease are at the tops of their fields. And it has been a leader in the country in emphasizing the importance of advanced nursing practices to good health care outcomes.

Meanwhile, FSFB’s faculty has generated more published medical research than any other institution in the country, much of it in collaboration with counterparts elsewhere in Latin America and in the Caribbean.

All of JHI’s collaborations are two-way streets, enabling us at Johns Hopkins Medicine to not only share our expertise but also learn about medicine in different cultural and health contexts. In the case of FSFB, the collaboration has inspired us to reflect on our mission—and remind ourselves that no matter how much we do to improve health and advance the field of medicine, there is so much more to be done.

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Empathy

May 23rd, 2014|Patient Care|By

by JHI Staff on May 23, 2014

EmpathyAt a recent Johns Hopkins Medicine International (JHI) staff meeting, we viewed a brief but powerful video created by the Cleveland Clinic that aims to evoke empathy for a fictional set of hospital patients, families and staff. A moving illustration of the need for empathy in health care, the video has gone viral online, garnering nearly a million and a half views.

While all of us at JHI are involved in working to improve health care delivery, most of us aren’t currently front-line clinicians, nurses or other caregivers routinely working directly with patients. But some of us are, and I assumed those folks would find the video particularly impactful. So I was surprised when, after the meeting, the highly experienced nurse care manager at JHI, Teresita Achanzar, expressed skepticism about the ability of this and other efforts to transmit the true nature of empathy in health care.

Teresita argues that genuine empathy for patients—a level of empathy that allows understanding what they’re going through well enough to be able to meet their needs and adequately support them—can only be learned one way: from the patients themselves. She offers a very simple, straightforward form of observational evidence to support her claim. Namely, she says that a good number of the newly minted nurses she’s worked with over the years, as much as they may sympathize with patients, have lacked that empathy when they start. It doesn’t matter what kind of person they are, or how they’ve been trained, or where, she says. They may be highly empathetic people in general, but when it comes to truly connecting to patients’ needs and challenges, they often fall short.

Part of the problem, Teresita explains, is that when they first land in hospitals after nursing school they have their hands full managing the mechanics of their jobs—mastering the different systems and routines and handling the countless problems that pop up in a patient population in the course of a day. They just haven’t ever had time, occasion or context to focus on relating to what patients are thinking and feeling.

But after a few years, most end up gaining that deep empathy, she says. That’s partly because of the on-the-job training and mentoring they’ve received from their managers and other colleagues, but it mostly comes from constant contact with the patients. Patients tell you how they’re feeling and what they’re thinking, she says, because they need you to understand. Over time, you learn to see it in their expressions and body language, and hear it in the tones of their voices. You can’t help but get it. And you can’t help being affected by it, and wanting to do what you can to help.

Teresita adds that all the challenges of acquiring that deeper level of empathy are magnified in international health care work. In the case of the many international patients who come to the Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, for example, there are often language barriers, a dearth of family members who can help bridge communications gaps, and cultural mismatches that may lead to clinicians or nurses unintentionally offending or confusing patients, or vice-versa.

In the case of the many hospitals around the world with which we collaborate, there may be cultural contexts that cause patients to hesitate to be fully open with some caregivers—for example, cultures in which women are discouraged from speaking up, or in which elderly patients expect that their children will shield them from decisions about their illness, or in which beliefs in traditional medicine lead to skepticism or fear of modern medicine.

Yet these and other barriers, too, ultimately give way to the process by which caregivers acquire empathy for patients, Teresita insists. Those patient-caregiver bonds form everywhere in the world, she says, and under the most trying of circumstances.

I’m sure many millions of hospital patients, former patients, and family members all around the world would join me in feeling gratitude for that process.

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Guest Post: How Health Care Hopes for Africa Are Becoming Realities

May 14th, 2014|Health Economics,Patient Care,Policy|By

by Juan Carlos Negrette on May 14, 2014

By Juan Carlos Negrette, Managing Director, Johns Hopkins Medicine International

Since its creation, Johns Hopkins Medicine International (JHI) has been actively involved in emerging economies, well before these markets came to be considered attractive to the investment community. For many years now, JHI has had active and vibrant collaborations in economically growing Latin American and Eurasian nations such as Colombia and Turkey, involving us in a broad portfolio of relationships in countries with vast economic and social differences—but all of them united by their need to improve patient care.

Eclipsed by the fast development in other geographic areas, Africa remained for a time at the edge of JHI’s peripheral vision. However, faithful to its ethos of looking in a less-orthodox way at health care market possibilities, JHI a few years back started actively considering the untapped potential in Africa as a diverse region blanketed with pressing health care needs. Sub-Saharan Africa accounts for 11 percent of the global population yet bears 24 percent of the global disease burden, while only accounting for 1 percent of the global health expenditure.

This disproportionate relationship between the continent’s needs and invested resources has no doubt contributed to some of the health-related calamities that are periodically highlighted by the international press. This calamitous image is perhaps the best-known face of Africa. But stubbornly as that image has persisted, a more accurate and auspicious one has begun to emerge alongside it: namely, the image of a continent crowded with resilient people that, in spite of real challenges, has come to house several of the most dynamic economies in the world.

Before JHI became involved in collaborations in Africa, we looked at the intense demographic changes the region was experiencing, and the unique economic dynamics at play there. We also observed the region’s existing health care infrastructure and workforce, which are sorely lacking compared to those of most other countries. These are the same characteristics that any health care investor would examine, but we brought a different perspective to the task—a perspective that went beyond simply avoiding significant risk, and that instead was biased toward recognizing opportunities that might have an impact on health in the region, with the requirement only that the attendant risk be manageable.

Our belief in health care investment opportunities in Africa has been validated. Today the economies of Nigeria, South Africa, and other African countries are among the top 30 largest of the world. A rapidly growing middle class is now a common feature throughout the region. The notion that Africa is an economic and health care “basket case,” as many once claimed, has been proven to be a shortsighted view, belied by the vibrant expansion now taking place there. We see enormous opportunities in Africa for us and other players in the global collaborative health care industry, such as a chance to create new institutions to address medical, nursing and technical education, and to advance clinical care, and in ways likely to improve social well-being.

JHI has already taken the first steps in forming strategic collaborations and partnerships, including an agreement to participate in the building of a string of clinics in Nigeria. Our discussions with potential collaborators are taking place not only in the largest and most advanced economies in Africa—they are literally all over the map. Where once we could only say that we had hopes for Africa, now we can say that we are executing on opportunities there. We're confident that other investors, academic medical centers and institutions involved in global collaborative health care will be joining us in greater numbers, and with ever larger commitments, in the coming months and years.

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Revisiting ‘Medical Tourism’

May 12th, 2014|Medical Tourism|By

by JHI Staff on May 12, 2014

It was nice to see The Economist weigh in with a brief examination of the “medical tourism” market that echoes themes I’ve emphasized before, even going back to one of my very first posts. I’ve long argued that there isn’t a lot of substance to the much-hyped notion that millions of patients would seriously consider traveling overseas for relatively routine and sometimes expensive medical procedures to save money while enjoying an exotic vacation, and the article backs me up on this.

The article points out that, for starters, the data thrown around by medical-tourism boosters has been muddled:

In 2008 Deloitte predicted an “explosive” boom in medical tourism, saying that the number of Americans going abroad for health care would grow more than tenfold by 2012. It did not happen. Poor data were part of the problem: whereas Deloitte counted 750,000 American medical tourists in 2007, McKinsey, another consultancy, found at most 10,000 a year later.

I would add another observation related to the problems with data in this field. To the limited extent that there are patients who get routine procedures far from their native countries, many are ex-pats who are living in or close to the country where they’re being treated, not people who have traveled far specifically for care. In other words, there isn’t a useful definition of what a “medical tourist” is. That fact alone ought to cast doubt on claims about the size of the industry, including those made by hospitals advertising themselves as centers of medical tourism.

I don’t mean to deny that the industry exists. It’s true that significant disparities exist from country to country in the costs of some treatments, and there really are opportunities for some patients to travel to get good care at lower cost.

But this observation needs to be heavily qualified. First, globe-hopping for medical treatment is likely to make the patient’s experience more challenging. Patients undergoing treatments—especially the more costly, extensive ones that someone might travel for—are vulnerable to pain, discomfort, depression, loneliness and anxiety both before and after the procedure. Certainly attentive, empathetic, highly trained hospital staff can help patients cope, and we work hard here at Johns Hopkins Medicine to do that for our international patients.

But patients also appreciate the presence of family and friends, and a chance to be back in their homes as soon as possible. As the Economist article notes about medical tourism:

Patient interest also turned out to be lower than predicted. Though some patients in the rich world seek out deals, most receive adequate health care at a manageable price and would prefer to stay at home. Potential savings are often insufficient to trump concerns about quality and the lack of recourse if something goes wrong. In 2008 Hannaford, an American supermarket chain, offered to pay the full cost of hip and knee replacements for its employees, including travel and patients’ usual share—provided they would go to Singapore. None took up the offer.

The article also points out that 98 percent of medical costs go to treatments that don’t readily lend themselves to the delays and stresses of travel. And it adds that even with the sort of short, relatively hassle-free travel faced by European patients who want to get medical care in another European country, cross-border health care accounts for only 1 percent of public health care spending.

The other qualification I would make is that even in those cases where medical tourism might make sense today, there will be fewer of those cases moving forward. Medical tourism is a transitional market—it’s a short-term response to the large changes roiling health care industries around the world. Right now we’re at a stage where patients in the United States and some other highly industrialized countries face much higher prices for some treatments than patients in other countries, even though the quality of treatment isn’t always that much better here.

But because of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and other efforts to reform health care in the United States, costs here may well come more into line with the rest of the world, and quality and outcomes are likely to improve. In addition, the ACA should ensure that fewer Americans find themselves with insurance gaps that necessitate large out-of-pocket costs for treatments.

Those sorts of improvements, and not medical tourism, are the longer-term, more steady-state solution to the cross-border inequities in availability, quality and cost of medical care. That’s one of the reasons the world has seen the rise of the new global collaborative health care industry that we at Johns Hopkins Medicine International are proud to be a part of. Global health care leaders are working to identify ways to more evenly distribute top-notch health care resources and facilities to all populations. Everyone with a role in health care—from investors to academic medical centers to governments to NGOs—also has a collaborative role to play in this new field.

There may always be certain complex, highly advanced procedures that patients will have to travel for. But as global collaborative health care efforts progress, we should see fewer of those—just as in the United States, we’ve seen once-daunting procedures such as common forms of cardiac surgery migrate from top medical centers to community hospitals.

An extensive medical procedure won’t ever be much fun. But it can be less of a burden when it takes place close to home. I hope more of us in health care can work together to make that happen for patients around the world.

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