Monday, October 15, 2012

A Growth Model for Greece - Medical Tourism

"Greece 10 years ahead" (GTYA) is the title of a study published by the Athens Office of McKinsey in mid-2011. It outlines a National Growth Model which, the study predicts, would create over 500.000 new jobs and add roughly 50 BEUR to Greece's GDP within a decade. The executive summary of the study consists of 72 pages. I have already explained in a previous post that I will make short posts about each major point of the summary for those who prefer not to read 72 pages.

The study focuses on growth opportunities in 5 major 'production sectors' which are already of prime importance to the Greek economy and on 8 'rising stars', i. e. new sectors where present activity is still small but where significant potential can be expected. In this post, I will focus on the 'rising star' of medical tourism (page 64 in the GTYA-report).

Rising Star ---Medical Tourism
Medical tourism has been a fast growing industry internationally in the last 15 years, seperated into the outpatient segment (e. g. dental care, cosmetic procedures, etc.) and the inpatient segment (e. g. cardiovascular interventions, orthopedic procedures, etc.).

Potential is seen for Greece in the rapidly growing 'middle-market'. Greece presently does not have much to offer because only one inpatient facility is accredited by the Joint Committee International compared with 43 in Turkey and 21 in Italy. At the same time, Greek hospitals lack collaborative agreements with leading international medical institutions.

GTYA identifies 5 levers which would enable the local industry to participate in this growth opportunity. It should be noted that there would be cross-benefits with the tourism strategy.

* develop a national strategy to position Greece in the 'middle-market' with a specific product/market focus
* establish modern quality, assurance, licencing and control frameworks
* pursue and maintain offer specialization to reduce costs through scale
* leverage networks to attract inbound volumes
* compliment the offer with necessary auxiliary services

For details, please refer to the GTYA-report.


Previous posts in this series: P1, P2, P3, P4, P5, P6.

1 comment:

  1. This is all well and good. The problem for Greece is that the shambles they are in has existed for so long that it seems to be part of their culture. The way things get done.

    Can you imagine trying to get a Greek bureaucrat to understand quality, assurance and control? Getting a Dutch bureaucrat to implement such things is hard enough when they are not present.

    Greece is in a real fix. There are ways to buck the "economies of scale" (= Germany). They are not easy to implement and need energy and passion. The Greeks have plenty of the latter only the implementation would be disorderly. That means the Greeks have to buck their own trends before being able to buck anyone else's.

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