The most important paradigm in the world economy these days is globalization. To accelerate the globalization process, conventions are being held nation wide and consensus is being reached to eliminate the obstacles of international trade.
The wave of...
The most important paradigm in the world economy these days is globalization. To accelerate the globalization process, conventions are being held nation wide and consensus is being reached to eliminate the obstacles of international trade.
The wave of globalization has greatly influenced the medical industry as well. With the recent WTO DDA negotiation progress, these influences have become an actual problem for us and it will effect us more rapidly as the negotiation becomes concrete. Up to now, a nation’s medical policy has been excluded from trade negotiations since medial policy is directly related to the citizen’s welfare. However, these days the medical industry is being perceived as a highly valuable service industry that emphasizes the importance of quality. Through the efforts of the nations attempting to develop the market and create new employment, the medical field is becoming a prospective field of trade.
This study reviewed the changes in the medical industry and open market analyzing the flow of medical policy and the various circumstances following these changes: evaluating which conditions were for the benefit of the nation while satisfying the individual.
In this report, the author points out that the medical hub strategy is the optimal solution for the development of the medical industry. Attracting foreign hospitals and foreign patients will open job opportunities and raise profit. This is the surest way for the government and the citizens to come out on top.
Also, for the medical hub to become one of the functions in realizing the goal for Korea to become the center of the Northeast Asia countries, we need to organize solid programs to sponsor medical tourism, attract foreign hospitals, and attract foreign patients.
In order to do this, we need to solidify our strengths such as economical competitiveness based on excellent medical skills and geopolitical situations while improving our weaknesses such as language barrier, lack of advertisement, lack of marketing, and lack of awareness.
We introduce the medical hub of Singapore and evaluate their advanced system. Singapore actively attracted foreign patients; therefore, in 2005, 400 thousand foreign patients received treatment in Singapore. In the year 2000, they earned 4 billion and 3 thousand US dollars, but in 2007, they expect an earning of 15 billion US dollars.
In Korea, profit oriented medical services are prohibited; however, in Singapore, not only is this allowed, but also foreign doctors are permitted to practice medicine. They are also allowed to advertise hospitals to attract patients and charge patients differently according to the services performed. The citizens also accept the differences as being fair “you get what you paid for.” This is one of the major differences between Singapore and Korea.
This clear difference is what defines the new policy: is it a hold back or a total acceptance? As such, Singapore’s medical market relies on the marketing logic. Also, the Medical Savings Accounts system related to the medical insurance is strictly regulated by the government as individual asset in our country, which is also different from Singapore. More importantly, we need to focus on Singapore’s medical environment, which is impossible to achieve in Korea. They have a unique medical practice system.
The ratio of public medical practice and private medical practice is 80:20 percent where the public medical practice has a firm foundation and plays a solid role in providing safe and secure medical services to the citizens. The private medical institutes are responsible for providing specialized high quality medical services for foreign patients and profit oriented purposes. On the other hand, the ratio of the public medical practice and private medical practice is 20:80 percent.
In Singapore, a city state with limited resources, the medical hub has potentials to continuously progress in the future through highly intellectual strategies of providing quality services; whereas, in Korea medical hub strategies are being adopted; however, we have not taken our first step yet nor have we reached an internal consensus.
This paper starts out with the actual problem of the Korean medical field where people are unfamiliar with the medical hub, to be more accurate, the people feel that there is no need for the medical hub itself. In contrary to the social medical field who opposes the opening of the medical market, we reveal the fact that opening the medical market will advance the medical field which will lead to the enhancement of individual’s quality of life and the country.
In order to develop the medical industry, we need to first ease government regulations regarding medical policies to attract foreign hospitals and foreign patients. We will need to discuss government support for sophisticated medical market after fully securing the public medical facilities. By turning our focus in the direction of high quality medical service and expanding the foreign market, we hope to simultaneously achieve enhanced quality of life in the individual and develop the nation by maximizing the utilization of intellectual resources and creating job opportunities.