Well today was our corporate visit day. In the morning we had both classes and then lunch was "box" lunches so we could take 30 minutes to get ready for the corporate tours. There were three options and obviously because of my career interest I chose to go to Dubai Healthcare City.
DHCC has been declared a "freezone" in the United Arab Emirates and so those of us attending had a lot of questions about what that meant. My major interest was to see what DHCC had to offer and to see what type of business model innovations they had to offer in healthcare.
From my understanding... none. Pretty much DHCC is an opportunity for providers (doctors) to establish private practices in Dubai and still own 100% of their practices and operate pretty much as they would in any capitalistic society. It is really an area that is made to cater to the high income people in this area and they still handle insurance and payments the same as they are done now. This was pretty disappointing. I was hoping they would be showing us how innovative they could be by building a healthcare sector and start new ideas from the ground up. Really the area to me just screams of the UAE government (the royal family) as segmenting healthcare, enticing high quality physicians through profits of ownership, and then profiting off of them being clustered in one area and located in Dubai. That may not make a whole lot of sense, but essentially I didn't see anything special going on here. I think they could have used the same profits enticements for physicians, but also been innovated in the way they handled payments, billing, insurance coverage, or other things. Those innovations would have really put them on the map.
Harvard Medical Center DC (Dubai City)
(I think this is suppose to be done around the first of the year)
They have definitely done really good marketing as there are people all over the world who have heard about Dubai Health Care City, yet I was really surprised to see the lack of activity in the area. It was almost like they were still in the planning phases or as another Duke student put it "If you build it, they will come." It was definitely worth going to see and learn about, but was not the cutting edge or innovative facility that I was expecting.
This is the master plan of DHCC.
(I'm pretty sure this model costs more than our house... by a long shot.)
This evening has been really low key. I've got a small paper I have to write tonight, but no other real homework. I am hoping to get to bed early though because tomorrow we have a 7am start and without some extra sleep that could be really rough!
I wanted to add on really quickly that I miss you so much! I sit here in this luxury hotel on the other side of the world and can only imagine how fun it would be to have you here with me. One day when we are rolling it in, we'll have to make Dubai a place to visit, just the two of us.
I love you so much! Have a wonderful day!
Love ya,
Brock
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