Tackling medical inflation priority for IHH

KUALA LUMPUR: IHH Healthcare Bhd will be tackling medical inflation as part of its broader sustainability goals in all of the countries it operates in.

The private healthcare group, which operates and owns hospitals such as Pantai KL and Gleneagles KL, acknowledged medical inflation as one of the “big challenges” that it should be tackling head on.

“In our lifetime and even our children’s lifetimes, medical inflation is a concern and it is a sustainability issue for our patients. In the end, they are the ones paying. Even if one

buys medical insurance, in the end it is the patients themselves who would pay,” said IHH Healthcare managing director and chief executive officer Kelvin Loh at a press briefing yesterday.

“Given the advancement in healthcare, we are living longer. This superior technology often comes with higher costs as well. Now we all want this better healthcare and as a leading healthcare provider we think this (medical inflation) is an important matter which is a sustainability issue of this generation,” Loh added.

He highlighted that medical inflation has been persistently outpacing gross domestic product (GDP) growth, which is typically about 8% per year while most economies in the region are not spending so much on healthcare as yet.

“They spend about 2% to 3% of GDP on healthcare. In the west, with a much aged population, they are spending 19.7% of their GDP on healthcare and we don’t think this is sustainable even from a private healthcare provider’s perspective. To make our business sustainable for our patients, we need to tackle this issue head on and this is why we are launching this initiative,” Loh said.

“We do this not just by pressuring suppliers or trying to use supplies that are less expensive which would compromise care. That is not the goal.

“The idea is to measure all series of activities, consumables, or how much time we spend for every procedure,” Loh added.

He said in doing this, the group would like to be the world’s most trusted healthcare services company eventually.

“What we are planning to do here actually has science and data backing it. Hopefully over time, those things which are not as effective and perhaps were not needed then we would avoid doing these and this helps to manage the (hospital) bill size,” Loh said.

“This is how we will conduct this business; by making patients better and to ensure they trust us more. It is about making a profit by putting in more things which they do not need (in the hospital bill). This is not what we aim for,” he added.