Private healthcare is entering a new stage of development.

Private healthcare plays an increasingly important role in public health care, but remains fragmented.

Lots of potential, but many bottlenecks

After more than two decades of socialization, private healthcare has become an indispensable part of Vietnam's healthcare system. With nearly 400 hospitals and more than 50,000 private clinics nationwide, this sector has contributed to reducing the burden on public healthcare, creating more choices and improving the quality of healthcare for the people.

However, the strong growth in quantity has not been accompanied by a corresponding development in quality, operational efficiency and competitiveness. According to Mr. Pham Duc Han, a member of the Vietnam Private Hospital Association, more than half of the current private hospitals are small specialized hospitals with less than 100 beds, many of which lack a development strategy, operate unsystematically, have fragmented investment and lack in-depth medical knowledge.

Mr. Han commented that many investors enter this field with a purely commercial mindset, lacking understanding of hospital management, medical standards and law, causing the system to easily lose the trust of patients and secondary investors.

In the context of increasingly deep international integration, private healthcare needs to proactively connect with international standards, from technology, operating procedures, management models to patient care.

This shows that the problem of private healthcare lies not only in scale, but also in depth, professional quality, brand reputation and connection with the public healthcare system.

Pharmacist Nguyen Xuan Hoang, Chairman of the Board of Directors of IMC Company, gave a different perspective. According to him, for private healthcare to develop sustainably, reforms are needed from both sides: changing business thinking and policy institutions.

From a business perspective, Mr. Hoang frankly pointed out that many private medical facilities are operating with a short-term mindset, lacking social responsibility and have not yet built an organizational culture. “In a field related to human life, we cannot do medicine with the mindset of chasing short-term profits. We must put quality, ethics and kindness first,” said Mr. Hoang.

According to Mr. Hoang, businesses must change their mindset from enriching themselves to creating value for the community. Sustainable development must go hand in hand with society.

In terms of policy and institutional aspects, Mr. Hoang emphasized the inequality between private enterprises and the public sector and the FDI sector in accessing land, capital, and human resources. He proposed that the State should have policies to provide substantial support, funding for research and development (R&D), investment incentives, and allowing technology depreciation, etc. to create a fair competitive environment for private healthcare facilities.

Technology and digital transformation: An inevitable trend

Prof. Nguyen Van De, Chairman of the Vietnam Private Hospital Association, warned that if technology is not adopted, private healthcare will soon stagnate. Therefore, Mr. De encouraged private healthcare facilities to boldly invest in digital transformation, applying artificial intelligence (AI), big data and personalized medicine, not only to optimize operations, but also to increase trust and transparency with patients.

Sharing the same view, Deputy Minister of Health Nguyen Thi Lien Huong affirmed that private healthcare cannot be separated from the national healthcare development strategy. The goal by 2030 is for private healthcare to account for at least 15% of total hospital beds and reach 25% by 2050. To realize that, Ms. Huong emphasized the role of policy, from network planning, licensing, to quality standards and synchronous data connection between public and private healthcare.

From a sociological perspective, trust is considered a “soft asset” that is vital to private healthcare facilities. A health policy expert believes that, in addition to finding a good doctor, what patients need more is transparency, service attitude, accountability and commitment from healthcare facilities. Therefore, developing private healthcare is not only a matter of investment, but also a matter of building a brand and long-term professional ethics.

This expert also pointed out that a factor that is rarely mentioned is the lack of connection between private health facilities with each other and with public health facilities. In fact, we still lack a unified value chain. Each private hospital operates as an “oasis”, making it difficult to create synergy.

“The public-private partnership (PPP) model should be expanded in the healthcare sector, but it must be accompanied by requirements for transparency, quality control and the ability to share risks,” he proposed.

It can be seen that the private healthcare sector is facing a special moment, when the Politburo has just issued Resolution 68-NQ/TW on private economic development, affirming: “The private economy is the most important driving force of the national economy, the pioneering force promoting growth, creating jobs, improving labor productivity, national competitiveness, industrialization, modernization, restructuring the economy towards green, circular, sustainable; together with the state economy, collective economy, the private economy plays a core role in building an independent, autonomous, self-reliant, self-reliant economy associated with deep, substantive, effective international integration, bringing the country out of the risk of falling behind and rising to prosperous development”. Along with that, the demand for health care is increasing, policies are gradually opening up, and technology in healthcare is changing dramatically. But if private healthcare continues to follow the beaten path, fragmented, spontaneous, lacking strategy, it will not only lose the opportunity to break through, but also find it difficult to become a pillar of the national healthcare system.

However, to be successful, private healthcare must change completely from the way of thinking, the way of doing things to the way of interacting with society. It is not just a capital investment activity, but a race of capacity, responsibility and real value.

Source: https://baodautu.vn/y-te-tu-nhan-dang-buoc-vao-giai-doan-phat-trien-moi-d278883.html