Cleveland, Ohio-based organization has launched
a project to construct a hospital in Abu Dhabi,
United Arab Emirates.
Yet it’s not as simple as sending a team into a
foreign city to replicate what you’ve created in the
United States, says David Strand, COO of
Cleveland Clinic.
“Bringing our expertise to other countries is a
great way to extend our mission and it’s a great
source of new capital for a non-profit organization,”
he says. “But it’s not easy. Building a 400-bed
hospital in a country 14 hours away by plane
where the culture, the regulatory environment
and the compliance issues are completely different
is more complex than you can imagine. It’s like
project management on steroids.”
Before committing to any project, Mr. Strand’s
group conducts due diligence to ensure the partner
has the same values and goals as well as the expertise
to carry out the mission. The team also investigates
whether the region and government are stable and
ensures there is a regulatory system in place.
“Before we put our name on a project, we
need to know we will be able to meet our own
quality standards,” Mr. Strand says.
Once a project is launched, Cleveland Clinic
puts a team of its own experts on the ground to
monitor project progress and work with the local
team to adapt its processes to local needs.
“There is no substitute for living, breathing
and working in the culture,” Mr. Strand says.
“It’s the only way to familiarize yourself with the
people, the politics, the regulatory environment
and the culture. You have to adapt the model to
be successful.”
Bill McDonald, director of international capital projects at University of Pittsburgh Medical
Center (UPMC), agrees. He was brought to the
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA-based organization
in June 2008 to oversee its international projects.
“We get frequent requests and questions from
medical centers about international partnerships,
and those were straining the internal project
management group,” he says, explaining that his
team’s project management approach varies significantly from that used for local projects. “What it
takes to build a cancer center in Greece differs
from Ireland or Italy or Pennsylvania. It takes
time to figure out.”
And that’s precisely what the organization will
be doing over the next decade. UPMC expects to
develop 25 cancer centers in Europe, the Middle
East and Asia through a joint venture with U.K.-based GE Healthcare, which works to identify
potential partners. With two centers already up in
Ireland, UPMC is now in discussions with healthcare companies in Turkey, Greece, Germany and
South Korea.
The challenge for UPMC is replicating its
proven cancer center formula while tweaking it to
We have an established way of building
and laying out our facilities, but that
needs to be adapted to the various needs
of the markets we are going into.
—Bill McDonald, University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
the needs, regulations and construction codes of
other countries.
“We have an established way of building and
laying out our facilities, but that needs to be
adapted to the various needs of the markets we
are going into,” Mr. McDonald says.
He and his team rely on local partners to
help identify key regulations and to bring in local
architects and engineers familiar with the market.
“Together we can best address all local concerns
and get the plans approved,” Mr. McDonald says.
U.S. teams must be willing to adapt their
development, leadership and project management
strategies to the local market, Mr. Wade says.
“Even issues that don’t affect medicine are
extremely important to acknowledge,” he says. For
example, the need for hospital beds to face Mecca
in Muslim communities can affect a hospital’s
design. “You have to be prepared to address those
cultural issues for these projects to be successful.”
