Exclusive: Interview with the MD of Bundamedik Hospital, Indonesia
By Nurfilzah Rohaidi
Nurhadi Yudiyantho discusses how the hospital does market mapping to understand the needs of patients.
For hospital leaders like him, market mapping is important to understand the needs of patients and the demand for healthcare, and design services based on that, he tells Hospital Insider. Bundamedik Healthcare System, the group which owns the hospital, has plans to expand their network of hospitals and fertility clinics over the next few years. Niche market studies help the group to determine the types of clinics or centres of excellence they need to provide, Yudiyantho explains.
The Indonesian market has “dynamic” healthcare needs as purchasing power increases, Dr Ivan R Sini, a renowned gynaecologist and a commissioner at Bundamedik Hospital, said recently. “We used to see the Indonesian healthcare market as segmented, with the market having limited capacity to purchase good quality healthcare products. But recently the buying capacity has increased rapidly,” he was quoted by e27 as saying. “Healthcare has become a primary need.”
Hospitals such as Bundamedik are making the choice to cater to this growing middle class. It is more challenging to serve the universal healthcare group of patients, Yudiyantho admits, as “it is a very small margin, since the return of investment will take longer - almost ten years.”
[blockquote]“It means that we can deliver more, focus on the patient needs, better facilities, better standard procedures from our doctors and services.”[/blockquote]Bundamedik Hospital limits the number of beds so they can provide better care, Yudiyantho adds. Instead of a few hundred beds, Bundamedik caps the number at 150. “It means that we can deliver more, focus on the patient needs, better facilities, better standard procedures from our doctors and services,” he remarks on the sidelines of the Clinical Effectiveness CEO Summit last week in Jakarta, hosted by Hospital Insider and Wolters Kluwer.
This helps the hospital to reduce medical errors as well. “What we can see from the CEO of Wolters Kluwer, is that lots of medication is basically unnecessary to give to the patient - about 20 or 30 percent of patients can be affected,” he notes, referring to a keynote presentation by Dr Denise Basow earlier that day. With fewer patients, doctors can be more careful with decision making at point of care.
The hospital attracts patients from elsewhere in the region, which is why it also operates two hotels for medical tourists. These patients come from other parts of Indonesia, such as East Java, Bali, and Kalimantan. “They get the treatment in our hospital and then a hotel stay,” Yudiyantho explains.
Research is a priority for the Bundamedik group, which operates Indonesia’s largest network of IVF clinics with 45 percent market share. IVF and genomics are two research areas of interest, according to Yudiyantho. “We put it back again, all the reports into the research and science. This is how we improve our services, how we improve our quality.”
In 2015, Bunda Medical Centre in Padang, West Sumatra partnered with Philips to address the problem of maternal mortality by testing a mobile obstetrics monitoring solution. This app allowed midwives to build a health profile of pregnant women by collecting data from physical examinations, tests, local nursing clinics and even patients’ homes.
As the Bundamedik group expands its network, the pressure is on leaders to “make sure that we can still deliver a good quality outcome for our patients,” Yudiyantho concludes. “That is most important.”