United Kingdom
London, 28 April 2009

 

• European cities dominate the top of the ranking
• Vienna scores highest for overall quality of living, Baghdad the lowest
• Singapore ranks top for city infrastructure; London ranks eighth

 

Vienna has passed Zurich to take the top spot as the world’s city with the best quality of living, according to the Mercer 2009 Quality of Living Survey. Geneva retains its position in third place, while Vancouver and Auckland are now joint fourth in the rankings.

 

Overall, European cities continue to dominate the top locations in this year’s survey. In the UK, London ranks at 38, while Birmingham and Glasgow are jointly at 56. In the US, the highest ranking entry is Honolulu at position 29. Singapore (26) is the top-scoring Asian city followed by Tokyo at 35. Baghdad, ranking 215, remains at the bottom of the table.

 

The rankings are based on a point-scoring index, which sees Vienna score 108.6, and Baghdad 14.4. Cities are ranked against New York as the base city with an index score of 100. Mercer’s Quality of Living ranking covers 215 cities and is conducted to help governments and major companies place employees on international assignments. See top 50 quality of living rankings below.

 

Slagin Parakatil, senior researcher at Mercer, commented: “As a result of the current financial crisis, multinationals are looking to review their international assignment policies with a view to cutting costs.”

 

“Many companies plan to reduce the number of medium to long-term international assignments and localise their expatriate compensation packages where possible though the hardship allowance, based on quality of living criteria, will remain an essential component of the package,” he added.

 

This year’s ranking also identifies the cities with the best infrastructure based on electricity supply, water availability, telephone and mail services, public transport provision, traffic congestion and the range of international flights from local airports.

 

Singapore is at the top of this index (score 109.1) followed by Munich in second place and Copenhagen in third. Japanese cities Tsukuba (4) and Yokohama (5) fill the next two slots, whilst Dusseldorf and Vancouver share sixth place. Baghdad ranks at the bottom of the table with a score of only 19.6. See top 50 infrastructure rankings below

 

Mr Parakatil commented: “Infrastructure has a significant effect on the quality of living experienced by expatriates. Whilst often taken for granted when functioning to a high standard, a city’s infrastructure can generate severe hardship when it is lacking. Companies need to provide adequate allowances to compensate their international workers for these and other hardships.”

Top 50 cities: Quality of living

Base City: New York, US (=100)

 

Rank 2009	Rank 2008	City	Country	Index 2009	Index 2008
1	2	VIENNA	AUSTRIA	108.6	107.9
2	1	ZURICH	SWITZERLAND	108	108
3	2	GENEVA	SWITZERLAND	107.9	107.9
4	4	VANCOUVER	CANADA	107.4	107.6
4	5	AUCKLAND	NEW ZEALAND	107.4	107.3
6	6	DUSSELDORF	GERMANY	107.2	107.2
7	7	MUNICH	GERMANY	107	107
8	7	FRANKFURT	GERMANY	106.8	107
9	9	BERN	SWITZERLAND	106.5	106.5
10	10	SYDNEY	AUSTRALIA	106.3	106.3

Top 50 rankings - City infrastructure

 

* City Infrastructure Ranking 2009 includes the following criteria: electricity, water availability, telephone, mail, public transport, traffic congestion and airport.

 

Rank 2009	City	Country	Index* 2009
1	SINGAPORE	SINGAPORE	109.1
2	MUNICH	GERMANY	106.5
3	COPENHAGEN	DENMARK	106.2
4	TSUKUBA	JAPAN	105.5
5	YOKOHAMA	JAPAN	105.1
6	DUSSELDORF	GERMANY	105
6	VANCOUVER	CANADA	105
8	FRANKFURT	GERMANY	104.8
8	HONG KONG	HONG KONG	104.8
8	LONDON	UNITED KINGDOM	104.8

More...

Economist.com | LONDON

UNITED AIRLINES announced last week that it would charge passengers for a second seat if they were too large for a single one. The policy on "passengers requiring extra space" took effect from April 15th and applies to those who cannot fit into a seat with the arm-rests down and with no more than one seatbelt extender.

Such passengers will be "reaccommodated next to an empty seat" if the flight is not full. If it is, they will be asked either to pay for an upgrade to another cabin or to travel on a later flight. On that later flight they will be put next to an empty seat if possible or be asked to buy a second seat.

Other airlines operate similar policies already, but these tend to be hidden away in their terms of carriage, if available at all. United, to its credit, has clarified its policy publicly, and has received considerable flak as a result.

The arguments, it seems to me, boil down to the question of what exactly a ticket is.

Is it a) the guarantee of transport for one passenger to an agreed destination? If so then the airline must provide seating for all, and any inadequacies must be addressed at no extra cost to the passenger.

Or is it b) the guarantee of a certain amount of space in the aircraft? If so, then a passenger needing more space is obliged to buy another ticket.

Gulliver hasn’t quite made up his mind. But what is certainly unfair is for regular-sized passengers to suffer when their neighbours cannot fit in one seat.

Some commenters have called for all economy-class seats to be enlarged to reflect the changing shape of modern populations. But that seems excessive: after all, most passengers do fit in them.

More...

Just posted this on one of the linked in healthcare groups that I presented to last week on a webinar.
-----------------

I wanted to follow up the Webinar that I have with an article I read on Business Week today.

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_18/b4129030606214.htm

My own take on it:

1. Eclipsys CEO Eckert says "There are months of testing by the client and us before someone activates a system."
a. Thorough and extensive testing, is not a strategy that is always followed. When testing is compressed or not thorough enough does that create the environment for problems to be discovered at go-live?

2. Article author Chad Terhune, Keith Epstein and Catherine Arnst “When health technology fails for one medical provider, there is no central mechanism for reporting problems to others who use it.”
a. Ask for a white paper on Lessons Learned from past EMR Projects, that will allow new clients to see and avoid pitfalls as well as inform HealthCare executives considering implementing EMR a guideline for proper project planning?

3. Information Overload – Dr. Mark Del Beccaro MIO at Seattle Children’s Hospital says "They told me, 'I get so many alerts, I click through [them],' "
a. Plan to avoid “Alert Fatigue” and understand the consequences of it?

My summary:
1. Plan well in advance, test as long as feasibly possible and as thoroughly as possible,
2. Consider the downstream (implementation) affects of design decisions that will impact the information that users see in the final product.
3. Gather as many “lessons learned” from previous projects as you can.

I thought the article pointed out some interesting areas that should be considered in any EMR project.

And I thought I was crazy!

I HAD my first international travel experience when I was 6 years old. My mom took me to the Philippines, and I wound up living there for two years.

Then, when I was 22, I went to Africa as an aid worker for an international charity group. I was traveling a lot between Africa and Europe. I remember being on a train and having this mad thought that I should visit 100 countries before I was 30 years old.

I did the math. And according to my calculations, it would cost about the same as buying a new sport utility vehicle, about $30,000. A lot of my friends were buying S.U.V.’s, but it just didn’t appeal to me. I wanted to spend my money learning about new cultures in places like Burma, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Lesotho and the Balkans, places I never thought I would see.

I began my 100-country countdown in 2006, and finished it in 2008.

But a strange thing happened. At about country No. 50, I had another eureka moment: “Why stop at 100?” I’m 30 years old now, and my new goal is to visit each country on this planet before I’m 35 years old. Some of my friends think I’m nuts.

One of the problems is that I am running out of places with easy access. It’s not like every country is an Italy or a Mexico. Soon, I’m going to have to start making arrangements to get to Chad, the South Pacific and central Asia.

I used to earn 200,000 bonus miles a year because of my business spending, but since I’ve become self-employed, those days are over.

I recently was approved for 13 credit cards, all of which offered mileage bonuses of at least 20,000 miles. So that’s going to be a big help. I keep waiting for an airline alliance to call, but until then I have no sponsors and pay for all my own expenses. The money comes from products I sell on my Web site and some limited business consulting. I recently received an advance from the publisher for my first book. I also have half a million frequent-flier miles from before, which I’m steadily going through.

I’m a good traveler, but things do go wrong.

Last summer, I was camped out in Hong Kong and decided to make a quick trip to Karachi. I didn’t have the paperwork ready, but I figured I would go for it. I put on the only nice shirt I had, and talked my way onto the plane.

In Karachi, the immigration officials were concerned that I didn’t have a visa or an invitation. I spent more than an hour in the office of a Pakistani supervisor, who told me he was arranging to send me back on the same Cathay Pacific plane I had arrived on.

So I did what any traveler would do: I begged and paid $150 for what the official called a United States visa-on-arrival paper. Supposedly, it was the first one they had given out to someone without a business sponsor in the last 28 years. I guess I believe them.

When I was in Mongolia, some other foreigner with more money than me got my guesthouse room. Unfortunately, I was already in it. Apparently, this guy flashed a lot of cash and the manager decided to throw me out on the street in the dead of night.

When I first started traveling, I always believed flying first class was the way to go. Now that I’m upgraded to first class on most domestic flights, I’ve become a little jaded. First class isn’t that great on domestic hauls.

So before I fly domestic, I sometimes offer to trade boarding passes with someone at the gate who is in coach. People are usually ecstatic to sit up front, and I know I’m not missing out on anything too exciting.

There’s no way I would trade my upgrade on a long-haul international flight, though. I may be a former aid worker, but I’m not a saint.By Chris Guillebeau, as told to Joan Raymond. E-mail:
joan.raymond@nytimes.com

Q: What's the difference between a nurse and a nun?

A: A nun only serves one God.

The joke may not have the currency of the latest from Jay Leno, but it illustrates two basics of medical humor: physicians are funny people, and nurses have a funny job. While there are exceptions to these rules, they're as close as you can get to generalizations about medical jokes. Jokes about MDs deal with their personality quirks, jokes about RNs deal with the difficulties of their jobs. Pharmacy jokes usually just deal with drug names, and it seems that other health-related professions just aren't funny.

Because physicians are a stand-in for healthcare in general, MD jokes cover the entire range of funny patients with funny complaints. For example:

A blonde visits her doctor and tells him, "I hurt everywhere." The doctor asks her to show him. The blonde touches her arm, "Ouch, that really hurts!" She then touches her cheek, "Ouch, that really hurts!" She touches her leg, "Ouch, that really hurts, too! See what I mean Doc?" The doctor says, "Let me try." He then touches the blonde's arm. She says, "Hmm, that didn't hurt." He then touches her leg. She says, "Hmm, that didn't hurt either." The doctor looks at her and says, "I think I understand: Your finger is broken."

This is a blond joke that takes place in a medical office.

Similarly:

Five surgeons are discussing who makes the best patients to operate on. The first surgeon says, "I like to see accountants on my operating table, because when you open them up, everything inside is numbered."

The second responds, "Yeah, but you should try electricians! Everything inside them is color coded."

The third surgeon says, "No, I really think librarians are the best; everything inside them is in alphabetical order."

The fourth surgeon chimes in: "You know, I like construction workers … those guys always understand when you have a few parts left over at the end, and when the job takes longer than you said it would."

But the fifth surgeon shut them all up when he observed: "You're all wrong. Politicians are the easiest to operate on. There's no guts, no heart, and no spine, and the head and butt are interchangeable."

Really, the joke is about accountants, electricians, librarians, and politicians – the surgeons are just part of the background.

Real physician jokes are relatively rare, and are more along time lines of …

"Doctor, are you sure I'm suffering from pneumonia? I heard once about a doctor treating someone with pneumonia and finally he died of typhus."

"Don't worry, it won't happen to me. If I treat someone with pneumonia, he will die of pneumonia."

Or the Henny Youngman classic: "I've got a great doctor. If you can't afford the operation, he touches up your X-rays."

In the same vein, we find:

Doctor: The tests show that your cancer is advanced. You have six months to live.

Patient: But, doc, I can't pay off my medical bills in six months.

Doctor: In that case, you have six months more.

*   *   *   *   *

The seven-year old girl told her mom, "A boy in my class asked me to play doctor."

"Oh, dear," the mother nervously sighed. "What happened, honey?"

"Nothing, he made me wait 45 minutes and then double-billed the insurance company."

*   *   *   *   *

A woman, calling Mount Sinai Hospital, said, "Hello, I want to know if a patient is getting better."

The voice on the other end of the line said, "Do you know the patient's name and room number?"

She said, "Yes, darling! She's Sarah Finkel, in Room 302."

He said, "Oh, yes. Mrs. Finkel is doing very well. In fact, she's had two full meals, her blood pressure is fine, she's going to be taken off the heart monitor in a couple of hours and if she continues this improvement, Dr. Cohen is going to send her home Tuesday."

The woman said, "Thank God! That's wonderful! Oh! That's fantastic! That's wonderful news!"

The man on the phone said, "From your enthusiasm, I take it you must be a close family member or a very close friend!"

She said, "I'm Sarah Finkel in 302! Cohen, my doctor, doesn't tell me a word!"

And:

Q: What's the difference between a general practitioner and a specialist?

A: One treats what you have, the other thinks you have what he treats.

Q: What's the difference between a surgeon and a puppy?

A: If you put a puppy in a room by itself for an hour, it'll probably stop whining.

Nurse jokes follow along the same lines – many of them aren't about nurses at all. In fact the next joke has been recast several times, using nurses, physicians, and insurance executives:

Three nurses went to heaven, and were awaiting their turn with St. Peter to plead their case to enter the pearly gates.

The first nurse said, "I worked in an emergency room. We tried our best to help patients, even though occasionally we did lose one. I think I deserve to go to heaven." St. Peter looks at her file and admits her to heaven.

The second nurse says, "I worked in an operating room. It's a very high stress environment and we do our best. Sometimes the patients are too sick and we lose them, but overall we try very hard." St. Peter looks at her file and admits her to heaven.

The third nurse says, "I was a case manager for an HMO."

St. Peter looks at her file. He pulls out a calculator and starts punching away at it furiously, constantly going back to the nurse's file. After a few minutes St. Peter looks up, smiles, and says, "Congratulations! You've been admitted to heaven … for five days!"

Or this one, which fits more aptly into the blond catagory, and for those old enough to remember, might have fit into the classic George Burns and Gracie Allen routine:

Doctor: "Did you take the patient's temperature?"

Nurse: "No. Is it missing?"

True nurse jokes focus on the difficulties of the job:

The nurse who can smile when things go wrong is probably going off duty.

*   *   *   *   *

Did you hear about the nurse who died and went straight to hell?

It took her two weeks to realize that she wasn't at work anymore!

*   *   *   *   *

They found a naked dead body of a nurse washed up on the shore today.

How did they know it was a nurse?

She had an empty stomach, a full bladder, and her butt was chewed out.

And this, which might be the seminal nursing joke if so much of it weren't true:

The Top Ten Reasons I Went Into Nursing:

10. I love to wear white support hose.

9. I get a kick out of arrogant doctors.

8. It's more challenging than brain surgery.

7. I get free latex gloves.

6. The scrubs are so flattering to my figure.

5. The world doesn't need any more lawyers.

4. I actually like vending machine food.

3. Somebody has to train the residents.

2. I get to spend the holidays with my friends … at work.

1. I always wanted to say, "This won't hurt a bit."

While pharmacists and pharmacies have figured in some wonderful professional cartoons by masters of the art like Gahan Wilson and Robert Mankoff, and Peter's Pharmacy appears fairly routinely in Johnny Hart's syndicated comic strip B.C., there may be only one true pharmacy joke, and it isn't even funny:

A physician is supposed to give a lecture, and writes down his notes, but that night he discovers that his index cards are all illegible, so he calls out: "Is there a pharmacist in the house?"

Some professions don't seem to have any occupational humor worth mentioning. Neither internet searches nor telephone interviews came up with any good jokes for medical technologists or physical therapists, but one PT did offer the following about chiropractors:

Q: How many chiropractors does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: Just one, three times a week, for the rest of your life.

Dentists probably get less than their fair share of jokes, and it only takes one example to show why:

A man goes to his dentist because he feels something wrong in his mouth. The dentist examines him and says, "That new upper plate I put in for you six months ago is eroding. What have you been eating?"

The man replies, "All I can think of is that about four months ago my wife made some asparagus and put some stuff on it that was delicious … Hollandaise sauce. I loved it so much I now put it on everything – meat, toast, fish, vegetables, everything."

"Well," says the dentist, "That's probably the problem. Hollandaise sauce is made with lots of lemon juice, which is highly corrosive. It's eaten away your upper plate. I'll make you a new plate, and this time use chrome."

"Why chrome?" asks the patient.

To which the dentist replies, "It's simple. Everyone knows that there's no Plate like Chrome for the Hollandaise!"

After a joke like that, nobody would want to hear another.

Here's what I have been working on, training this software to Cedar Pharmacists. This is my 5rd straight weekend that I have been up here training!

Inpatient Pharmacy

EpicRx Inpatient Pharmacy System is a key component of Epic's "closed-loop" medication ordering and administration process, linking pharmacists, ordering physicians and nurses to a single order record. With EpicRx, pharmacists can monitor medication treatment and improve medical outcomes, improving patient safety, minimizing adverse effects and helping control costs. Orders from EpicCare flow directly to EpicRx for verification and dispensing and also appear automatically on the MAR. Pharmacy staff have direct access to the chart during verification, empowering them to play a more active role in patient care, and verified orders can be routed to the appropriate dispensing device or to pharmacies outside the system. Changes made by a pharmacist are also automatically updated and available for other users.

Wanted to write about the PMP certificate and the presentation I am doing for PMI Healthcare SIG this week.

Project Management Professional (PMP^®) Credential

One of the most valued credentials in project management, the PMP credential assures employers that you are committed to project management. Earning and maintaining this credential demonstrates a solid foundation of experience in effectively managing projects.

Candidates for the PMP credential:

  • Perform their duties under general supervision and are responsible for all aspects of the project for the life of the project.

  • Lead and direct cross-functional teams to deliver projects within the constraints of schedule, budget and resources.

  • Demonstrate sufficient knowledge and experience to appropriately apply a methodology to projects that have reasonably well-defined project requirements and deliverables.

Presentation Title: Ingredients for a Successful EMR Implementation

April 23, 2009 • 12 PM - 1 PM EDT

Deciding to adopt an EMR is one of the most important decisions made by any health system. The transition to an EMR from a paper system can be challenging due to the fact that it will change the way everyone works. In this presentation the presenter outlines the common pitfalls identified by experts in the field. This information will help in planning your implementation .

Target Audience: Experienced Project Managers, PDUs: 1

Register Today!

Working again this weekend, I got to add something about this building I pass by everyday to work. Its owned by the legendary Larry Flynt of the Hustler fame, fought the government and won.. this guy is a true rags to riches fame. The building is very much a homage to the maverick as an architectural anomaly on busy la cienega

World Class Design

Noted designer William Pereita designed this one-of-a-kind building in 1972. This masterwork is a modern Rococo design consisting of curving lustrous surfaces with two beautifully appointed grand entrances. The Flynt Building stands out among buildings in Los Angeles as being one of a handful of oval shaped buildings in existence.

Fine Art Sculpture

Constructed of steel and solar glass and utilizing a unique elliptical shape it is famous for the absence of base and top features giving the building the presence of fine sculpture.

Originally designed for the banking institution Great Western Savings, The Flynt Building maintains a landmark sculpture of actor John Wayne. Wayne was company television spokesman and after his death in 1979 Great Western installed the statue of the actor riding a horse on the Hamilton Street side of the building. This tribute now stands as a reminder of he original owners.

The Building Today

As of 1984 the Flynt Building has been owned by Free Speech activist Larry Flynt. It is home to Flynt Publications, the Brazilian Consulate, many private Law Offices and more. With its close proximity to La Cienega's restaurant row and offering floor-to-ceiling windows, unprecedented views and comfortable grounds the Flynt Building is an ideal location for corporate occupancy.

Current Flynt Building Tenant List

Wow, its been almost a month since I wrote an entry. Been working really hard on the new project... I did have one good weekend when sis and Pk were down but it was pretty busy. We went to OC, Santa Monica Pier, a place near thai town call cobra and matador, the Grove.

Was working last weekend, our pilot training for Pharmacists started so was totally busy with that. I did manage to go to the Grove on Saturday night to watch, "I love you man', that was wierd cuz they actually had the grove in the movie.. its like they passed by the movie theater!

One article I read on a healthcare blog, I wanted to post:

Meiloo.com: China’s future Web 2.0, proto-HMO

Posted By Damjan DeNoble

Yesterday we had a sit down with the President of Meiloo, Yan Zhang.  Meiloo is an exciting company for several reasons, but if you are not a Chinese health professional, then chances are that you have not heard of Meiloo because the company peddles exclusively to Chinese private clinics, and Chinese patients.  The first time we heard about the company was in early 2008, when the start up was featured in the April issue of China International Business Magazine (though the cover of that issue featured Olav “Kro” Bauer of The Kro’s Nest, where I was the closest thing a three restaurant strong pizza business could have to a GM, through November of 2008…just a point of pride…).

In brief, Meiloo is a health care provider referral gateway, connecting patients seeking care with health care providers in Beijing and Shanghai.  Their business model is simple - Meiloo screens private clinics offering care in one of seven separate categories (Plastic surgery, dental, OBGYN, ophthalmology, weight loss, spa, and psychological).  They have contracts with the clinics they advertise, and Meiloo gets paid on a per referral basis.

Patients, who receive care at a Meiloo partner clinic, can log in and describe their post up experience.  To augment the self reporting of patients, Meiloo does a further series of follow ups with the providers and patients to paint comprehensive picture of the clinics it works with.  At the end of a one year contract cycle, Meiloo chooses which of the clinics they should continue working with, basing their decisions on a set of internal quality indicators.This last part of what they do as a business is, in my view, the keystone of their value added proposition to the Chinese health industry (and I will go into further, but later in the article).

Yan pointed out early on in our talk, and at the very end, that  figuring out just how to appraise the health care services of clinics is the trickiest part of the job - one that Meiloo is putting a lot of time into - and that this process lies at the center of Meiloo’s “primary value”;

Meiloo’s “primary value is to provide transparency” in China’s private health care sector,  and to build  “a basis of trust” for the relationship between the Chinese health sector and the Chinese public.

Our talk with Yan covered a lot of ground, and even included an ad-hoc lesson given by Meiloo co-founder, Jeffrey Wu, on why Chinese web-pages are on the whole so much more crowded than the majority of web-pages designed for western readers.  James will be writing about how the talk with Yan shaped his view of Health Web 2.0 in China in a later post.  What struck me are the implications that Meiloo’s success could have for the managed care industry in China.

I will back up a bit, and give some context before I dive into these (exciting) implications.

At one point in our conversation, I asked Yan about his views on how the 850 billion yuan health reform package that China unveiled in February is going to impact China’s health industry.  Yan’s main concern was that it did not address the status of doctors, in the sense that they were not given freedom to practice independent of a public institution, and that this , in effect, furthered a damaging unspoken rule, by where doctors’ prestige is tied to the size and reputation of the public hospital they work for, while their wallet size is dependant on the private hospital they moonlight for.  The catch 22 is that access to the best (and highest paying) private hospitals is more than somewhat dependant on the size and quality of one’s social and professional network, which, again, starts at one’s public hospital.

So, according to Yan (and I fully agree, having seen my parents go work within a similar system as doctors in the pre-war republic of the former-Yugoslavia), if the success of the health reforms is predicated upon the ability of community and provincial level clinics and hospitals (Tier I and II) to better themselves, and this betterment is dependant a large part on the quality (and, in some cases, quantity) of doctors available, then failing to address doctors’ status would seem to be a big misstep.  When doctors status and prestige is tied to public hospitals, then young medical graduates will continue to naturally gravitate towards the biggest hospitals since they will, rightly or wrongly, “see [postings at small, community health establishments] as career dead ends.”

(To their credit, however, the draft persons and policy makers of the health reform seem to be aware that doctor’s status is an issue, and you can read about it in this interview with Dr. Li Ling, a primary draft person of the health reform here, and here, where I wrote about it in a previous post.)

The implication of this failure to address the status of doctors in China is that while the nationalization of health care is probably going to happen, China is going to move towards a hybrid nationalized/privatized model because the lack of incentives to bring doctors to smaller hospitals is going to leave China with little choice but to semi-privatize the public health sector.

This is very much like the round of privatizations of SOE’s in the late 80s and throughout the 90s.  Yan predicts that we will start to see this happen in the next five years.  If smaller community and provincial level health facilities are able to go private, then, naturally, the lure for doctors to go there will be higher because of the financial rewards.

So how does this lead to Meiloo, and the implications its success has for managed care? About two months ago I wrote about the difficulties of establishing a TPA in China, in a piece called Third Party Administration in China: Shortcuts are Pointless where I said that someone wishing to set up a successful China TPA organization needed to put themselves in a position to have as much information about the market as possible, because while the concept of a TPA organization is easy enough, timing one’s entry into the China insurance regulation market was difficult, and no major international insurer is willing to jeopardize its entry in the Chinese market by partnering with an inexperienced (or illegal) TPA company, instead;

“[Insurers] want someone to offer them a solution for when the market opens, and nobody knows when that is going to be. So, they don’t need someone to regulate their prices. They need someone to position their business so that when the market opens it hits the ground running, and gives them an advantage that the competition is not going to have. “

Meiloo.com fits, to a tee, all of my previous requirements of a successful, TPA like, China market entry guide for health insurance companies. With every new clinic (currently Meiloo.com works with 310 clinics, but Yan said “frankly, we could have signed up many more”) and patient it  partners or follows up with, Meiloo.com gathers market information that know one else in China has.  Yan is already amazingly knowledgeable about the Chinese health industry for someone who professes “not to be a health care guy,”  but “simply a marketing guy.”

Moreover, by establishing financial partnerships Meiloo.com has already built that precious ‘guanxi’ that will be so important for insurers wishing to come into the market.  The best part, is that Meiloo fulfills all the roles that a health insurer looks for in a TPA, without ever really venturing into territory that could clash with the regulatory impulses of the MoH and/or the CIRC (Chinese Insurance Regulatory Commission) since none of what it does is truly a regulatory role.

What’s really amazing, is that Meiloo is doing all this through a fairly simple online marketing platform that is more Web 1.0 than Health 2.0.  Yan likened the web of health information on Chinese Internet as something resembling an early WebMD where one could only find STD related info, leading to the very funny moniker “WebSTD”.

If health 2.0 takes off in China as quickly as it did in America, and Meiloo.com keeps track, it could very well be a global Fortune 500 company, and a one of a kind China TPA.  Traditional, American-based HMOs will be left in the dust.

We’ve seen how Health 2.0 has started to redefine the role of patients in the developed health care space of the United States.  But, in the ‘under development’ Chinese health care space, Health 2.0 with Meiloo.com at the forefront, has the chance to redefine how the entire system is structured. Remember, folks - Asia Health Care Blog said it first.