"The medical service
market"
The report presented here is
addressed to all units and people interested in the medical service market, especially to:
health service establishments managers, representatives of the institutions which finance
the health service trade (banks, leasing companies, investment funds) and all
entrepreneurs funding health care packets for their employees.
The aim of our report is to
present the basic issues of the medical service, which is undergoing one of the most
dynamic and interesting developments amongst many segments of the Polish service sector.
Due to the unclear situation of the public medical service establishments and the
imprecise evolutionary directions of the Polish healthcare system, we have focused in our
analysis on this part of medical service market which has been developed by private units.
Since the reform of the
health service in 1999, the market of the medical service has attracted foreign
investments, the value of which is estimated at more than billion of PLN. As the result of
introducing the elements of the free market into the health care system, a buoyant and
modern sector of non public establishments has appeared. Their activity draws attention to
the high rate of change in this area, and highlights the lack of enough investment in
Polish healthcare.
In the opinion of the trade
experts, the state medical service market has not been fully established and subdivided
yet. The introduction of a larger stream of the investments coupled with the demands
associated with Poland joining the European Union will force the medical service trade to
undergo another crucial transformations. In this report we will try to capture the current
state of the medical service market and its probable scenarios of development.
In the second chapter of the
report we will describe the transformations in the medical service trade from the 80's
till August 2003. In the third chapter we will try to estimate the potential of the of the
medical service market and to see the factors which create this potential. The fourth
chapter presents the law regulations on the medical service both these for HCE and those
for the private surgeries. In chapter five we divide the medical service market into
segments and we look at them via the prism of the specifics of the activities of the
individual health care establishment and different kinds of medical specialisations. The
sixth chapter of our report is devoted to the increasing role of the health insurance on
the medical services market, whereas in chapter seven we present the comparison of the
standard medical service prices offered by big and small health care establishments, units
with a strong reputation and by these only starting their activity in the trade, the
metropolitan establishments and medical firms from smaller towns. In the eighth chapter we
look at the investments in the medical service trade and in the ninth chapter we focus on
the medical equipment market and particularly on the purchases by the health care
establishments. The tenth chapter is devoted to the management of the health care
establishments, the eleventh involves a wide analysis of promotion and marketing aspects
of the medical service firms' activity ( including the promotion and advertising of these
units, the role of public relation activities and the increasing significance of the
Internet in the medical units image creation). In the next - twelfth chapter of the report
we look at the ways of the authorisation of the medical service trade firms, we describe
the most important trade certificates and highlight their increasing popularity. In the
final chapters - the thirteenth and fourteenth - we present mainly the problems of our
trade and the perspectives of its development in the nearest years.
We hope that our report,
which is one of so few studies on the private health service in Poland, will turn out to
be a valuable source of the information useful for the discussion of the future of the
health service in Poland. We also hope that the announced changes in the health care
system in Poland will initiate dynamic and spectacular development of the medical service
units and it will be pleasure for us to describe the future of this trade in the second
edition of our report.
Contents
1. Introduction
2.The transformations in the medical service trade
2.1. The health care system before 1999
2.2. The system reform of 1999
2.3. The role of the privatisation in the development of the medical service
2.4. The place of the non-public Health Care Establishments (HCE) in the present system of
the health protection
3. The characteristic of the private medical service demand
4. The law regulations associated with the medical service market
4.1. The most important regulations for health care establishments
4.2. The survey on the requirements associated with formation and running surgeries
4.3. Other legal issues associated with the health service functioning
5. The medical service market segmentation
5.1. The structure of the units acting on the medical market service
5.2. The characteristic of multi-specialised country-wide medical centre nets
5.3. The situation of private hospitals
5.4. The characteristic of the chosen medical service specialisations
5.4.1. The labour medicine
5.4.2. The family medicine
5.4.3. The dentistry
5.4.4. Other specialisations
6. The role of voluntary health insurance in the medical service market development
6.1. The health insurances in the European Union countries
6.2. The complementary health insurance market in Poland
7. The offers' price of the medical services
7.1. The general characteristic of the services' prices in non-public health service
7.2. The price structure of the typical medical services
8. The investments in private health service
9. The issue of financing the medical equipment purchase
10. The organisational structures and health care establishment management patterns
10.1. The role of the specialist software assisting health care establishment management
11. The promotion and marketing aspects of the medical service trade companies' activity
11.1. The general rules of the medical service marketing
11.2. Medical service promotion and advertising
11.3. The role of public relations activities
11.4. The use of the internet medical service trade firm's image
12. The issue of the medical service establishments authorisation
12.1. The significance of the ISO certificates for the medical trade service
12.2. The Health Care Quality Monitoring Centre accreditation
13. Main problems of the medical service trade
14. The development perspectives of Polish medical service market
92 pages