Health Care Entrepreneurs Research Articles

SMCH – the innovative pediatric care hospital from India

Subject area The subject area is entrepreneurship. Study level/applicability Graduate and executive education level in leadership, entrepreneurship and strategic management are used to discuss leadership, entrepreneurship and strategy in health services. Case overview This case talks about the passionate journey of a pediatrician practicing in the Mumbai city of India, who as an individual private practitioner is contributing to the fulfilment of the global health agenda and the fourth Millennium Development Goal (MDG) – “reduce child mortality”. His vision is to make quality and affordable expert pediatric care accessible to all the individuals, right from pre-birth to adulthood. Surya Mother and Child Care Hospital (SMCH) is being strengthened as a nation-wide network of mother and child hospital offering patient/consumer-centric integrated collaborative quality care, and it needs to be seen how this model can be made sustainable as it enlarges in scale for the future. Expected learning outcomes The case is structured to achieve the following learning outcomes: to understand about effectuation as a logic for entrepreneurial success through the lens of Dr Avasthi and his venture SMCH; To understand and apply Porter’s Principles of value transformation that essentially focus on outcome-driven cost-efficient work practices in a collaborative integrative fashion, where transformation must come from within (some practices suggested can be applied to the Indian Healthcare Services Delivery systems); to critically analyze the overall strategic position of SMCH as an organization and its competitive environment; to discuss the factors influencing health-care delivery capacity build up, given the MDGs 2015, Every Newborn Action Plan and Indian Newborn Action Plan framework, as applicable to India; and to discuss and analyze mechanisms for future sustainable service delivery options for SMCH. Although each of these principles is important, possibly, the instructor could emphasize and encourage more discussions on potential models of shared partnerships that can help quality health-care services reach the unreached and the incorporation of technology in achieving this. The learning process can also facilitate discussions about leadership qualities in the creation of health-care entrepreneurs, for the “Change That They Would Want To See”. Supplementary materials Teaching notes are available for educators only. Please contact your library to gain login details or email support@emeraldinsight.com to request teaching notes. Subject code CSS:3 Entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurs ' perspective on public-private partnership in health care and social services.

The purpose of this paper is to probe experiences of entrepreneurs in the social and health care service provision. Information was collected regarding entrepreneurs' views on the factors affecting the collaboration between public and private sectors. A sample of social and health care entrepreneurs was interviewed using open-ended questions. The interviews were transcribed and analysed using inductive content analysis. Three main categories of factors affecting the success of partnership were identified: the nature of partnership, business aspects and tension builders. Research LIMITATIONS/IMPLICATIONS: The research was undertaken in rural Finland and the sample consisted 13 entrepreneurs. The results must be considered as observations with more generalised conclusions. PRACTICAL implications - The results of this study support municipalities in their social and health care service strategy work and especially in consideration of how to also facilitate a fruitful public-private partnership (PPP)-framework, which will largely depend on mutual understanding and consensus. The reform of the social and health care system has raised intensive public debate throughout Europe. Key issues include the reorganising of social and health care processes as well as PPPs in provision of services. This study observes the views and experiences of private entrepreneurs and points out where some potential problems and solutions of social and health care PPPs are.

The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism and Healthcare Entrepreneurship in Mission Hospitals in Ghana

The current global healthcare market requires hospitals to fundamentally and constantly transform the way they function and identify new foundations or avenues to gain or consolidate any competitive advantage. We investigated whether hospitals managed by Protestants (Presbyterian or Calvinist) in Ghana exhibit entrepreneurial capabilities and competencies than hospitals managed by Catholics and Muslims due to the perceived inherent spirit of capitalism in Protestantism (Calvinism). Seventy five religious (mission) health facilities located across Ghana were evaluated for their entrepreneurial orientation with respect to autonomy, innovativeness, risk taking and competitive aggressiveness. The findings established that hospitals in Ghana which are managed by Protestant Churches (Presbyterian) do not differ in the adoption, application and use of entrepreneurial values and practices from those managed by Catholics and Ahmadiyya Muslims. The research contributes to the existing literature that puts the generalizability of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic notion into dispute. Its novelty lies in the extension of Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic theory to analysing entrepreneurial culture in managing healthcare institutions in a “religious centric” Sub-Saharan African society”

Entrepreneurship Education in Health Care Education

This study describes the content of entrepreneurship education in health care education and the kinds of teaching methods that are used when teaching about entrepreneurship. Health care entrepreneurship has increased in many countries in recent decades and there is evidence that entrepreneurs have also a role in public health care. Therefore the health care professionals need to be educated to have the entrepreneurial skills. Education in the field of health care is still based on traditional forms of teaching and does not give enough attention to the issue of becoming an entrepreneur. The data was collected from teachers(n=111)via e-mail from six Finnish polytechnics. The data were analysed statistically and the open-ended questions were analysed via content analysis. Approximately 23% of the teachers had taught about entrepreneurship. The most popular teaching methods were company visits and cases, lecturing, and project work. The courses dealt with establishing a company, entrepreneurship in general, and marketing. Nearly all of the teachers had cooperated with the entrepreneurs or with the companies in question. Approximately 33% of the teachers took entrepreneurship into consideration often in other courses related to entrepreneurship.

Why Big Data Won't Cure Us.

The biggest challenge for the use of “big data” in health care is social, not technical. Data-intensive approaches to medicine based on predictive modeling hold enormous potential for solving some of the biggest and most intractable problems of health care. The challenge now is figuring out how people, both patients and providers, will actually use data in practice. To understand how data-intensive solutions could have an impact on health care, our research team talked to frontline providers in impoverished and rural areas, technology enthusiasts in mobile health and health IT startups, clinicians and researchers in major research hospitals, Quantified Self members at data-driven meetup presentations of massive amounts of tracking data, and attendees at the growing number of conferences for health technology and innovation up and down both coasts. I found the buzz as feverishly loud around health information innovation as it was during my research on the first dot-com boom. One of our findings from this research seems at first blush so obvious that it is hard to believe it has been overlooked in the design and implementation of health-care innovation technologies. Namely, people imagine data in very different ways. Understanding this key fact about data helps us understand why so-called “big data” solutions to health care are so difficult to implement in practice. Doctors, patients, and health-care entrepreneurs all value data in very different ways. One physician simply said, “I don't need more data; I need more resources.”* Saying this in Silicon Valley or at TedMed would be tantamount to heresy. Ditto for those of us who work in research and spend our careers collecting, massaging, managing, analyzing, and interpreting data. From the doctor's perspective, though, data require (and do not save) extra interpretive, clerical, and managerial labor. This perspective on “data,” at least with regard to current clinical practice, is that data use up more resources than the benefits they provide. In other words, most doctors think data innovation means more work for them, not less, and takes away time from what they see as their key priorities in providing quality care. In another setting, we observed nurse-practitioner case managers in a Medicare demonstration project working with a simple algorithm parsing patient-entered health data. Combined with case management, these data provided a look into the daily health of chronically ill elderly patients and a pathway for the care when it was needed. The data in that project were tightly tied to medical expertise within an existing clinic where a trusted person could initiate a chain of care responses. Although widely recognized as a clinical success, Medicare pulled the plug on the project for financial reasons—expertise is expensive. These two reactions to data-intensive pilot projects highlight the dilemmas of data-analytic approaches to health care. Businesses are in the thrall of the possibilities of ever-increasing predictive analysis on expanding troves of generated data. While the business and technology sectors see data as valuable, doctors often see data as costs, risks, and liabilities. And for many in health care, data are not seen as a source of value, but of additional work. Without the work needed to make data valuable and useful in particular settings in particular contexts in health care, big data will never solve problems. To turn a technology truism on its head, data in health care will never be free. And yet, the ways in which health technology innovators have talked about the power of data neglects key aspects of the social interoperability or integration of data into health solutions. How will such data be integrated into care providers' work practices; through the complex routines of clinics and hospitals; and into existing legal, social, political, and economic frameworks? These questions are enormous. Until we solve these questions of social interoperability, the risks presented by “big data” in health will outweigh the benefits to any particular individual, regardless of whether we're talking about terabyte-scale analytics or the “small-data” of n=1 individuals. What follows is an outline of how to tackle these questions based upon what our team has seen throughout our research.

The Marketing Challenges of Healthcare Entrepreneurship: An Empirical Investigation in Nigeria

This paper investigated the effects of such independent variables as technology, market segmentation and cost reduction on the delivery of the consumer-endorsed services with special interest on healthcare entrepreneurs in Aba and Umuahia metropolis. 96 questionnaires were administered randomly among medical doctors, pharmacists/laboratory technicians and qualified nurses/midwives of 12 hospitals in Umuahia and 20 hospitals in Aba metropolis. Out of the 74 copies returned, 72 were found usable for analysis. Analyzing the data using simple percentages, t-test and Pearson Correlation Coefficient, it was found that the interactions between the aforementioned independent variables and the delivery of patient-endorsed healthcare services were statistically significant. Therefore successful healthcare delivery requires the challenges of channeling competencies to market segments where competitive advantage is enduring as opposed to spreading thin across various fronts. Based on the financial setbacks of private healthcare providers and the need to further liberalize the economy, the government was advised to borrow the conspiracy theory of the Japanese. This involves the tripartite of the government, the banks and the entrepreneurs whereby the last can borrow money for a long time to acquire latest equipment and other resources with the help of government guarantee. Also, government was advised to intensify more effort on making the public healthcare providers more proficient and more humane in the delivery of patientendorsed services since their private counterparts charge high and worst still they rarely have the necessary resources in place.

Caring for healthcare entrepreneurs — Towards successful entrepreneurial strategies for sustainable innovations in Dutch healthcare

The sustainability of current healthcare systems is threatened by several societal developments, including an aging population, an increase of unmet medical needs and rising healthcare costs. A transition is needed in order to meet these threats and to achieve a proper balance between the demand for care and the capacity to supply it. Entrepreneurs play a crucial role in developing the required sustainable innovations for this structural change. They are able to develop innovations in close interaction within the healthcare context. This paper studies entrepreneurial strategies for the successful development of sustainable innovations in Dutch healthcare. Data comes from semi-structured interviews with healthcare entrepreneurs. Results show that entrepreneurs experience the interaction with the healthcare system context in various ways and act accordingly. Four types of sustainable healthcare entrepreneurs could be identified: isolated, innovative, evolutionary and revolutionary. These entrepreneurial types differ in terms of their beliefs as to whether and how individual entrepreneurs can contribute to achieving structural change in healthcare.

Health Care Entrepreneurship in the Democratic Republic of the Congo: An Exploratory Study

In this empirical study, the authors explore entrepreneurship in the health care business in the Eastern Kasai Province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) using cross-cultural literature and the resource-based view to ground its analyses. The data were collected using a questionnaire targeted toward the health care entrepreneurs in Mbuji Mayi, the capital city of the Eastern Kasai Province in July 2010, which yielded 68 responses. The results indicated that the entrepreneurs were predominantly middle-aged Congolese men with backgrounds in the health services field who had raised their startup capital mostly from personal savings or friends and family. Their businesses, which were mostly in the form of sole proprietorships, were likely to be located in areas underserved by public medical facilities and usually provided both curative and preventative medical services.

Where Are the Health Care Entrepreneurs? The Failure of Organizational Innovation in Health Care

Medical care is characterized by enormous inefficiency. Costs are higher and outcomes worse than almost all analyses of the industry suggest should occur. In other industries characterized by inefficiency, efficient firms expand to take over the market, or new firms enter to eliminate inefficiencies. This has not happened in medical care, however. This paper explores the reasons for this failure of innovation. I identify two factors as being particularly important in organizational stagnation: public insurance programs that are oriented to volume of care and not value and inadequate information about quality of care. Recent reforms have aspects that bear on these problems.

A Diagnostic Approach to Understanding Entrepreneurship in Health Care

Health care is quite different from other industries because of its organizational structure, service delivery, and financing of health services. Balancing costs, quality, and access presents unique challenges for each stakeholder group committed to promoting the health and healing of its citizens. Using the diagnostic approach to health care entrepreneurship, we created a framework from research in the field to understand the predisposing, enabling, and reinforcing factors most relevant to successful entrepreneurship.

Entrepreneurship Management in Health Services: An Integrative Model

This research develops an integrated systems model of entrepreneurship management as a method for achieving health care organizational survival and growth. Specifically, it analyzes current health care environment challenges, identifies roles of managers and discusses organizational theories that are relevant to the health care environment, outlines the role of entrepreneurship in health care, and describes the entrepreneurial manager in the entrepreneurial management process to produce desirable organizational outcomes. The study concludes that as current health care environment continues to show intense competition, entrepreneurial managers are responsible for creating innovations, managing change, investing in resources, and recognizing opportunities in the environment to increase organizational viability.

Health care Entrepreneurship: Financing Innovation

Entrepreneurship is often described as the ability to create new ventures from new or existing concepts, ideas and visions. There has been significant entrepreneurial response to the changes in the scientific and social underpinnings of health care services delivery. However, a growing portion of the economic development driving health care industry expansion is threatened further by longstanding use of financing models that are suboptimal for health care ventures. The delayed pace of entrepreneurial activity in this industry is in part a response to the general economy and markets, but also due to the lack of capital for new health care ventures. The recent dearth of entrepreneurial activities in the health services sector may also due to failure to consider new approaches to partnerships and strategic ventures, despite their mutually beneficial organizational and financing potential. As capital becomes more scarce for innovators, it is imperative that those with new and creative ideas for health and health care improvement consider techniques for capital acquisition that have been successful in other industries and at similar stages of development. The capital and added expertise can allow entrepreneurs to leverage resources, dampen business fluctuations, and strengthen long term prospects.

Under the Radar: Stealth Development of Two-Tier Healthcare in Canada

The shocked reaction of commentators to the recent Canadian Supreme Court decision (Chaoulli v. Quebec) overturning Quebec's ban on private healthcare insurance is difficult to square with the facts and policy options realistically open to provincial governments. The problem is that rhetoric has centred on preserving a single-tier universal system that has never existed in the form its supporters imagine. Meanwhile, quasi-private agencies and healthcare entrepreneurs have been improvising private care options, either ignored or abetted by governments. Consequently, policy and practice have become increasingly divergent. Supporters of Canadian-style medicare can only hope that the Chaoulli decision will force clearer-headed policy re-appraisal. Towards that end, this paper argues that provincial governments ought to focus more on robust regulation of already existing, privately financed healthcare, including the commissioning of care by Workers' Compensation Boards.

Gender Differences in an Emerging Health Profession: Ghanaian Women as Itinerant Drug Vendors

The analysis in this paper is based on a sample of 517 itinerant drug vendors (IDVs) who were interviewed in Ghana during the summer of 1997. IDVs are health care entrepreneurs who provide inexpensive services in medically underserved areas. We describe the differences between men and women IDVs in order to assess 1) their potential to improve health services and 2) the possibility that sex segregation may be lessened in this innovative new profession, allowing women to make a greater contribution to health services delivery. Results indicate that IDVs may be a relatively untapped health resource, but segregation remains strong, thus their full potential is hampered as it is in institutionalized biomedicine.

Helping healthcare entrepreneurs: A case study of Angel Healthcare Investors, LLC

There is a significant financing gap for businesses seeking between $US250 000 and $US2 million. Filling this gap are the approximately 400 000 business angels scattered across the country who invest approximately $US30-40 billion a year in 50 000 early stage businesses. Increasingly angels are investing together in groups. Angel Healthcare Investors (AHI), LLC is one such angel group comprising investors with backgrounds in the healthcare sector who invest in innovative business start-ups in various healthcare markets. The paper describes AHI's operations, yield rates and portfolio firms. It concludes with a view of current trends in angel investing.

Outsourcing and the Role of Psychological Services on the College Campus

This paper explores the complexities involved in transferring psychological services to off-campus providers. The ethical and legal responsibilities of colleges and universities to provide services that encourage the development of the student may not be met by health care entrepreneurs who do not take into account differences between the needs of college students and those of members the larger society.

Outsourcing and the Role of Psychological Services on the College Campus

This paper explores the complexities involved in transferring psychological services to off-campus providers. The ethical and legal responsibilities of colleges and universities to provide services that encourage the development of the student may not be met by health care entrepreneurs who do not take into account differences between the needs of college students and those of members the larger society.