South Korea Medical Tourism Diary. Part 2: Inha University Hospital
Continued from Part 1: The trip from Boston
November 27, 2007
I met up with the group in the lobby of the Shilla Hotel at 8 am and we jumped on a minibus to take us to the Inha University Hospital in Incheon, basically retracing our path back to the airport where I'd arrived the previous night. Traffic was reasonably slow but no worse than what you'd typically find around Boston. When we arrived at the hospital the business manager, Dong-Hun Yun was waiting for us, and welcome signs with our names were taped up, with arrows pointing to the meeting room.
Inha Hospital is part of the Hanjin Group, one of the chaebols --the conglomerates that have dominated the Korean business environment. Hanjin also owns a transport company (you'll recognize the name from seeing trucks and railroad cars in the US), Korean Airlines and many other companies. They also own a couple of universities, which I found a bit surprising but apparently isn't unusual.
Two of the physician leaders gave us an overview of the hospital. It is a general hospital with 34 clinical departments, 906 beds and 2000 staff, including 450 physicians. They have about 2500 outpatient visits per day, an average daily inpatient census of 777, and 46 visitors per day to the Health Promotion Center. Total revenues are about $175 M (US).
We walked around the hospital, visiting some very nice patient rooms and a busy operating room suite. Stephanie Sulger is a former operating room nurse and she gave me a couple of tips on how to gown up and make my mask comfortable. The operating rooms looked fine --similar to a typical US community hospital from a few years back. They have electronic medical records and electronic ordering systems and a number of high tech systems, including a Cyberknife for neurosurgery that will come on line early next year.
Inha is at the early stages of addressing the medical tourism market. On the positive side Inha has close ties with Korean Airlines and lodging. Its airport medical center (which we didn't see) already serves flight crews. About 4000 foreign patients were seen at Inha last year, although I think the vast majority were already in Korea as expats, soldiers or tourists rather than coming specifically as medical tourists. The hospital is looking into JCI accreditation and may receive accreditation in 2008. On the downside it seemed that many of the questions Stephanie, David Boucher and I were asking were ones they were hearing for the first time. For example, they didn't seem to have thought through the international patient liaison function in a very detailed way and one of the senior physicians we met had not heard about medical tourism at all.
The bone marrow transplant center seemed promising. It was headed by Dr. Chul Soo Kim, a US-trained hematologist who seemed ready to handle Americans.
We also visited the clinical trial center, which focuses on phase 3 pharmaceutical trials. According to the director, Dr. Moonsuk Nam, almost all the trials are for multinational firms. There aren't many Korean drug firms and they are not doing trials of medical devices or traditional medicine.
At lunch we had the opportunity to mingle some more with the physicians and administrative staff. After a bit of effort my guide helped me procure a vegetarian meal. I got a kick out of Stephanie using a pair of scissors to cut her thick noodles, but she can still deny it since I didn't take a photo.
See Part 3: Yeson Voice Examination Center