Business Advise
“Ask an Expert” Business Advice Column by Steve Strauss
Sponsored By:
 “Miracle”
June 2005
Q: My career has been centered in the law, which as you know is an old-school, traditional industry. I have an idea for a business that tweaks the profession in a new way. I hope it would be successful, but am not sure it would be. Any thoughts on how to proceed?
Jack, St. Louis
A: Of course big businesses will always have an edge insofar as resources are concerned, but small businesses win when it comes to agility and responsiveness. The secret to competing against established interests therefore is to do something innovative, something large corporations cannot do because of their size and complexity.
Take the Miracle Mile Medical Center in Los Angeles for example. This pioneering small business may, just may, turn another long-established industry, medicine, on its ear.
Today there is much that ails the medical community. Aside from high insurance premiums, exorbitant prescription costs, an overly-corporate tone, and the fact that health care today seems more concerned with dollars than sense, what really makes many of us ill (pardon the pun) is the impersonal care we and our loved ones receive, especially in hospitals.
This was a problem that vexed Dr. Gil Tepper as well. An internationally recognized spinal surgeon, Dr. Tepper has worked at some of the most prestigious medical institutions in the country – the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York, UCLA, and so on. So Dr. Tepper knows first hand the benefits and detriments of large medical institutions.
He concluded that while large hospitals today may make a lot of money, patient care is lost in the process. And because Dr. Tepper has the heart of an entrepreneur as well as a surgeon, he had a hunch that a small, personalized hospital, one that was more concerned with patients than profits, would fill an unmet need in modern medicine. He was right.
His innovative hospital, the Miracle Mile Medical Center, is setting new highs for personalized patient service. How unique is medical care at Dr. Tepper’s challenge to traditional health care? Consider:
- It only has 17 beds (as opposed to hundreds.)
- At a time when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is fighting with the California Nurses Association over the proper ratio of nurses to patients (currently the ratio is 5 patients for every 1 nurse), the Miracle Mile Medical Center has a 1:1 ratio, and compassion and personal care are the norm rather than the exception. Talk about first doing no harm!
- The fully-accredited hospital not only has an area for families in each room, it is also a world-class orthopedic and spinal center.
- Because there is no middle management, patient care costs less, the savings are passed on to patients and insurance companies, and the business still has healthy profit margins.
- Doctors at the hospital are part of a virtual network that allows them to access patient information day or night from anywhere.
- When patients check out, they receive a card with a magnetic strip that contains all of their records and other pertinent hospital stay information.
So it is not surprising that when I spoke with Dr. Tepper last week, he said that the Miracle Mile Medical Center was “pioneering a new health care delivery model.”
Certainly patients at the boutique medical center notice the difference. Because Dr. Tepper runs his small hospital like the small business it is, he does plenty of patient surveys and these surveys indicate a very high level of satisfaction. And whereas conventional hospitals are traditionally slow to respond to problems, this “lean and mean” small business is “agile and quick to respond to issues that may arise.” The result is a business that listens to its customers (the patients) and quickly responds to ensure continued quality care.
Doctors notice the difference too. Because the hospital is owned by the doctors who work there and not some faceless corporation, the experience for the medical staff is “more fulfilling,” Dr. Tepper explained. Rather than worrying about forms and files, doctors at the Miracle Mile Medical Center actually concentrate on something novel, called health care.
The result is that doctors and nurses like what they do more, patients get better care, the hospital makes a nice profit for its owners, and insurance companies pay less.
Given the state of the rest of health care in the U.S. today, the Miracle Mile Medical Center just may be a miracle after all.
Today’s Tip: “Innovation,” says Dr. Tepper, is “how paradigm shifts begin.” For the small business then that is competing with the big boys, the secret to success is to “do something they cannot.”
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