About the time my dad was getting fed up with the legal business, his friend’s business (called Tempco) started to falter along with the economy. As businesses faced a tough economy, temps were the first to go. My dad decided to step in and try his hand at being a businessman.
As Tempco’s troubles mounted, my dad wracked his brain trying to figure out how to save the business. He was not content to find a way through the current recession. He wanted to find a way to avoid the deleterious effects of the next one as well. One evening, when he had reached an all-time low, an idea came to him -- medical!
He realized at once that the medical industry was essentially impervious to economic cycles. Healthcare is a basic human need. People will spend their last dollar for it. So, he renamed the business Medco (and later Arcadia) and started offering temporary nursing and hospital staff. The business branched into home care and eventually grew nationally. It never suffered another recession.
Amidst budget cuts and diminished staffing levels, it is easy to forget how secure we are relative to other industries. The healthcare industry has enjoyed somewhat of a bubble over the last 20 years or so. Just as the manufacturing industry was forced to pursue efficiencies after offshore competitors ate away their profits, the healthcare industry must now do the same.
MSIS is at the epicenter of the effort to drive out cost. While we may not always succeed, our goal should always be to find ways to make medical education better, faster and cheaper. As is the case in the private sector, organizations that are more successful will receive greater funding.
Whatever we do, whether it is keeping a laptop operating at peak efficiency, improving the performance of a database, answering a question that gets someone back to work, or writing new software to improve the efficiency and quality of analyzing curriculum performance, we are contributing to one of the most important goals of UMMS. It is easy to lose sight of this when you are in the trenches, but remembering it gives us purpose and allows us to make better decisions about what we should be doing.
Like any industry, healthcare is evolving. Evolutions require some disruption, but we can all take a lesson from my father. If we do our jobs well, we can avoid the effects of the next recession...and any that follow.
As someone who has purchased a Long-term Health care policy recently, I share the concern of the rising healthcare costs. This is a good reminder that we have a role in this.
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