Governments in emerging markets face mounting challenges in managing health spending, building capability and capacity, modernizing ageing infrastructure, and investing in skills and resources. One path to overcoming these challenges is to establish new public-private models of health care development and delivery based on United States academic medical centers, whose missions are to advance medical education and clinical delivery. Johns Hopkins Medicine is a participant in the collaboration developing between the Perdana University Hospital and the Perdana University Graduate School of Medicine in Malaysia. These two organizations comprise an academic health science center based on the United States model. The Perdana project provides constructive insights into the opportunities and challenges that governments, universities, and the private sector face when introducing new models of patient care that are integrated with medical education, clinical training, and biomedical research.
Private hospitals are expanding in Latin America, but the industry is less developed in this region than in some other emerging markets. Groups of hospitals are emerging in countries such as Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Peru. However, they haven't reached the size of hospital groups in Malaysia, India and South Africa. They also remain domestically focused, while companies from the aforementioned three emerging markets outside Latin America have expanded to multiple other countries and have listed on stock exchanges to access more capital to finance their expansion. It is very likely that these trends seen in other emerging markets will manifest in Latin America as it continues to develop.
Established 20 years ago with a single dialysis center assisting only 20 patients with 6 hemodialysis machines, Medicare has grown leaps and bounds to assist thousands of poor patients to obtain a highly subsidized rate for quality treatment. Millions of ringgit raised via various fundraising projects and events have been well utilized to serve the growing number of kidney patients in Malaysia who simply cannot bear the exorbitant cost of treatment. Staying true to its mission, Medicare extends its assistance to needy kidney patients and their families, who indirectly have become part of the Medicare family.
The current status and directions for changes of issues related to quality care in health services in Asian countries--Malaysia, China, Singapore, Japan and Korea are overviewed. In countries with public sector dominated health care systems such as Malaysia. China and Singapore, governmental leadership in quality care is prominent along with legislative backup. Japan and Korea have private sector dominated health care systems and quality care activities are mainly carried out by non-governmental organisations. Hospital accreditation programs are in the developing stages in most countries, although China and Korea started in 1980. Most Asian countries are at the initial stages in quality care activities and focus has been placed on education and training. Asian countries are not exempted from efforts to enhance quality care activities and a new horizon in quality health care is emerging.