The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center is exporting its knowledge and management services around the world, to countries like China and Lithuania expanding healthcare for emerging middle class populations.
UPMC Advisory Services has reached an agreement with a healthcare operations company in Lithuania to help design and manage a 100-bed cancer center in Vilnius, the nation's capital city with a population of 540,000, and one of many such deals in UPMC’s $10 billion global health enterprise.
Under the 15-year management agreement with the GK Klinika Group, UPMC will help plan and train staff for the center, set to open in 2017, and will oversee clinical, administrative and technology programs, including cancer detection programs, genomics-testing pilots and disease-specific treatment pathways. UPMC physicians will also provide consults via telemedicine for advanced surgeries and second opinions.
Lithuania’s healthcare system is somewhat similar to Germany’s “Bismarck model,” with publicly-funded low-cost and free basic medical care and an insurance fund for hospitalization and acute care, with about 75 percent of funding from payroll taxes and the rest allocated by the national budget.
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Vilnius, the capital city of Lithuania
While the the hospital will take patients covered by public and private insurance from the Baltic region, GK Klinka is funding the project with all private financing. The Lithuanian government is working to encourage foreign business investment and growth, said Charles Bogosta, president of UPMC's international and commercial services division.
For UPMC, the agreement with one of several “international growth and commercialization efforts” is aimed at diversifying sources of revenue and development to support research and local community development.
In 1996, UPMC partnered with Italy to create a transplant center in Palermo, the Mediterranean Institute for Transplantation and Advanced Specialized Therapies, and then in the 2000s took on operations and services contracts in Ireland and elsewhere, some of which brought financing problems. Earlier this year, UPMC sold the last of its stake in the 214-bed Beacon Hospital in Dublin, with a loss of $106 million, although another UPMC-led Irish cancer center is continuing unaffected.
Overall, UPMC’s new Advisory Services consulting business is growing, landing contracts in 10 countries, including China, India, Japan, Kazakhstan and Singapore. In 2011, UPMC started providing second-opinion pathology consultations virtually to China’s largest independent medical laboratory, KingMed Diagnostics.
A part of another deal, a five-year advisory services agreement with the 3,500-bed Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, UPMC will help run the new 200-bed Xiangya International Medical Center.
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The Xiangya International Medical Center in Changsha
UPMC has worked with the Xiangya Hospital, in Hunan Province, for a decade in research, and Chinese medical students have come to Pittsburgh for training. The clinical collaboration in this new partnership, involving quality assurance, technology guidance and telemedicine consulting “is UPMC’s most extensive effort yet” in China, said Bogosta. “The financial and intellectual capital generated by this partnership will allow UPMC to advance its clinical and research missions in western Pennsylvania and beyond.”
A group of UPMC-affiliated researchers also recently won a $4 million National Institutes of Health grant to continue a 25-year study of mortality, cancer, genetics and environmental and lifestyle factors in two populations, 18,000 men living in Shanghai. China’s largest city, and 62,000 Chinese-speaking individuals in Singapore.
Over the next five years, the group plans to follow more than 2,700 cancer patients and look for biomarker-based clinical opportunities for prevention and treatment trials.
While research and clinical trials have become less of an option for many health systems in the U.S., in China, medical researchers are tracking mortality, cancer and other diseases, where cost-effective therapies are much needed for aging societies and growing cancer and cardiovascular disease incidence.
“Having the ability to examine diseases in large populations is reshaping the way we approach diagnosis and treatment. We’re excited about the possibilities this research holds and what we’ll learn next,” said Nancy E. Davidson, MD, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute and UPMC CancerCenter.
