Down and Out in Mysore

Today I was down - and out for the count. Unfortunately, I had a recurrence of vertigo that incapacitated me for the day. I spent 22 out of 24 hours in bed asleep, the two hours I was awake I attempted to read the assigned chapters, but my head did not cooperate. So, I am hopeful that this will be a short lived bout and I will be up and at it tomorrow.

As I laid in bed today, I thought about our visit to Vikram Hospital on Monday. Thinking about what the administrator there is doing to build that business into a world class facility, I can't help but wonder how I could create a business opportunity for myself out of it. Since the hospital has had some people coming to India to have procedures performed for 1/3rd to 1/10th the cost for the same procedure in the U.S., creating and executing some value add service for those people could be quite lucrative. Or, perhaps, finding a way to perform consulting or coordination services for insurance companies in order to help them lower their costs would be another possibility.

Needless to say, Friedman's ten flatteners become apparent when considering how this could be done. First, the advent of the internet was critical for me to even be able to conceive of an idea along these lines. Second, would an HMO's management consider offshoring a specialized medical center in order to reduce its costs? The HMO could implement extremely high standards by hiring India's very best physician's to provide superior care to its patients, but still save vast amounts of money. The effective supply-chaining of medical supplies, pharmaceuticals, and capital equipment would enable an HMO to purchase them for a fraction of the costs as the same items in the U.S.; many of the manufacturers exist in India and this region of the world. I could inform myself by doing my research about regulations, barriers, insurance companies, etc. via the internet. And I could in-source by becoming a global company right off the bat. Well, there is so much to consider here that it makes my head spin - oh, wait a minute, my head was already spinning!