Moldova

 

HBI 2023: Managing your costs in challenging times

Rising costs from inflation, wages, and energy are indiscriminately hitting the health care sector and despite government support packages being pledged, the road ahead looks arduous. So how do providers control costs, and what are the strategies to keep costs at bay?

CEE – a land of opportunity?

With 125 million people - 80 million of whom live in the big four (Poland, Romania, Czechia and Hungary) - CEE is a large and diverse market. But is it a tempting one? HBI-365 members heard an expert panel in our CEE State of the Regions broadcast suggest that while COVID is creating huge problems across the world, it is also creating opportunities in Central and Eastern Europe.

Interview: Arjan Toor, CEO, Cigna Europe

Cigna now describes itself as “a global health service company” rather than an insurer and has reorganised its European operations. Toor has recently been promoted to CEO Europe. He says that the insurer, which has 15% (US$840m) of its revenue in Europe, doesn't want to verticalise through owning primary care providers but wants instead to provide an end-to-end user experience.

Hope for tariffs in Portugal

Portuguese for-profit operators say they are optimistic that the leftist government will not introduce swingeing tariff cuts. 

Interview: Dr Rajgopal Thirumalai, Vice President, Global Medical & Occupational Health, Unilever

Unilever runs a global health and prevention programme in over 90 countries for its 169,000  employees. How? What does Dr Thirumalai (known as Dr Raj) think of the private healthcare services sector? And what changes does he expect in the future? And what does he expect from digital health and AI? Dr Raj is also a non-executive independent director of Apollo Hospitals Enterprise and a speaker at HBI 2018 on April 10-11 in London.

Interview: Dr Rajgopal Thirumalai, Vice President, Global Medical & Occupational Health, Unilever

Unilever runs a global health and prevention programme in over 90 countries for its 169,000  employees. How? What does Dr Thirumalai (known as Dr Raj) think of the private healthcare services sector? And what changes does he expect in the future? And what does he expect from digital health and AI? Dr Raj is also a non-executive independent director of Apollo Hospitals Enterprise and a speaker at HBI 2018 on April 10-11 in London.

Interview: Attila Vegh, CEO, Penta Hospitals Group

By 2025 Penta Hospitals Group (PHG) owned by private equity house Penta Investments, plans to more than triple sales to over €1bn. But growth could be even faster, says its new CEO, Attila Vegh, a former boss of three large English NHS hospital trusts. The real ambition of the group, a merger of Svet Zdravia in Slovakia, the Polish chain EMC and Penta’s hospitals in Czech Republic, is even greater than the sales forecasts suggest. Much of the growth he says will come from working with the public sector. Vegh says that Penta wants to be “a disrupter, a company which introduces best practice and innovation,” thus persuading public payors to rethink their attitude to the private sector. So how do you do that in a region which is becoming increasingly statist and hostile to international capitalism?

Euromedic appoints HSBC

Imaging services provider Euromedic has appointed HSBC to review the business. Bankers expect this to lead to a sale this autumn.

Polish Mandatory Health Insurance/Reform: Presentation, Joe Ryan, CFO, Medicover

Joe has 17 years experience as CFO of Medicover, the only Pan-East European provider of comprehensive medical services from insurance to hospitals, ambulatory centres and diagnostics. Medicover is active across Poland, Germany, Romania, Ukraine, Turkey, Belarus, the Balkans and other ex-Soviet republics. Presented at the Healthcare Europa Annual Conference 2014, The Return of the Bull Market.

Find Us