By Rachna Dayal Goel and Badri Narayanan Gopalakrishnan
The world is going through a Global Healthcare Crisis where healthcare systems and institutions are experiencing fault lines and breakdowns like never before. The triggers for this are many but the consequences are drastic for both patients and providers alike. Some key negative impacts of decades of activities are a lack of clinicians where they are needed most, clinician burnout and quitting at unprecedented rates, lack of access to medication due to supply chain issues & nationalism, differing regulatory frameworks, and lack of data transparency between countries for global population health issues.
It will take significant efforts on the part of countries to overcome these challenges and navigate national health systems to a place where population health can thrive and there is a balance between demand and supply of skilled labour, products and services. No one nation can produce all healthcare products and services needed by its citizens by itself. However, given the geopolitical complexity of current times, it is also not wise to partner strongly with regions and countries with whom principles are not aligned.
Choosing the right Healthcare Trade Partners becomes a strategic decision with a long-term lens for success and development. We recommend thinking of healthcare goods and services trade between countries in terms of “Healthcare Corridors” – a word that we coin herein – that can ensure a higher probability of success for strategic partnership between countries. In this article, we develop some basic and broad operating principles for such ‘Healthcare Corridors’ and provide some top-level metrics that can measure the effectiveness and success of these Healthcare Corridors once established.
Definition of a Healthcare Corridor
A ‘Healthcare Corridor’ between two or more countries may be defined as an integrated & interdependent system of Health & Wellness related design, innovation, manufacturing, and other services that are developed within a designated industrial cluster, within defined healthcare economic zones between the two or more countries. Successful Healthcare Corridors will balance demand and supply of healthcare products and services between the two countries and in doing so will positively impact economic growth within the two countries and encourage bilateral trade, in addition to promoting the well-being and health of the people at large in the countries in the corridor.
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The countries engaged in Healthcare Corridor development should pay close attention to the healthcare and economic needs across the borders and come to a common understanding and agreement on policies, investments, and metrics of success that can be measured. With this approach, there are higher chances of success and strengthening of political and business relations between the countries involved. Of course, a lot of the usual challenges involved in trade agreements are also applicable to these corridors. Some of them have to do with the balance between industrial policy and free trade, for example. Questions like the following are indeed tricky and have to be tackled case by case: To what extent should we allow for foreign healthcare workers to enter our country so that our local healthcare workers do not lose their jobs or face salary cuts or get disincentivized to pursue the profession? To what extent should we allow our own workers to go abroad, given the acute shortage of such workers in our country?
Setting Up for Success
To enable the development of a strong ‘Healthcare Corridor’ between the countries it is important that the governments involved understand what level of confidence private investors have in bilateral trade and investments across the two countries. What are the challenges and key reasons for failure in the past if any? Can these challenges be mitigated with policy efforts or with investments? Can certain initiatives be launched with haste to address burning topics across the countries? Let us consider an example across the US/India in the healthcare sector:
USA is facing a shortage of clinicians due to multiple reasons including clinician burnout, longevity, strikes and clinicians leaving the profession for other professions like entrepreneurship. India on the other hand has a very young labour force that is well educated and trained. In addition, the Indian government is investing in medical, paramedical, clinical and other healthcare education extensively. Given this situation, a dedicated ‘Healthcare Corridor’ could work to enable special clinician Visas for Indian clinicians in the U.S. to meet its population health needs. This would be a policy and immigration-focused solution and can be made time-bound or number-bound based on the needs of US healthcare.
Monitoring Performance
Over time a few simple metrics can help monitor the health (pun intended) of the “Healthcare Corridor” between any two countries. These metrics can be simple like Ease of Regulatory Approval for medical products, Political Stability, Access to talent in healthcare, Access to capital for healthcare investments and special immigration/visas for healthcare professionals needed across the two countries. It is important to get feedback from industry leaders on these metrics and not just from government officials to ensure that trade is indeed flourishing within the ‘Healthcare Corridor’.
(The authors: Rachna Dayal Goel is Managing Partner Sugati Ventures and Dr. Badri Narayanan Gopalakrishnan is Fellow, NITI Aayog. Views expressed in the article are those of the authors and not of their affiliated institutions or financialexpress.com.)