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East Meets West
UMBC Travels to China and Back to Create Partnerships with Medical
Administrators. Eleven thousand miles separate UMBC's suburban Baltimore campus from the city of Shanghai in southeastern China, but a new partnership has brought the two closer together.With the arrival of five Chinese physicians last summer, Continuing Education and the Health Science and Policy Program began an international partnership that enabled the doctors -- all senior medical administrators in Pudong New Area, a booming district near Shanghai -- to experience a five-month training program that included extended rotations at four Baltimore hospitals and a series of seminars at UMBC on management topics ranging from peer review to how to raise an endowment. The Chinese administrators' objective: to find ways for medical institutions in Pudong New Area to sustain themselves in an economy that moves increasingly to the tempo of the free market.
During their five months in Maryland, the physicians did rotations at the Baltimore VA Medical Center, Kernan Hospital, Saint Agnes Hospital, and the University of Maryland Medical Center. Joyce Riley, associate director of the Health Science and Policy Program, was part of a three-member team that developed the curriculum for the training. The profound differences between the medical systems of China and the United States -- as different as the two countries' economic systems -- ensured that the three weeks of briefings at UMBC also would be time well spent, Riley says. For example, the issue of staff management takes on an entirely different character in a free-market economy, the Chinese administrators learned. They were surprised at the high rate of staff turnover in American medical care. "That was something they didn't understand, because [in China] once they start working for an institution, they stay there the rest of their lives. It's an interesting thing to them that out of a work force of 3,000, some 500 might leave every year." They were also surprised to learn that American physicians generally have independent practices. In China, doctors work for hospitals.
The Pudong program is part of UMBC's growing portfolio of international partnerships. More than 200 Egyptian high school teachers of English as a foreign language have been trained on campus in recent years. Newly signed memorandums of agreement with institutions in Portugal and Mexico will promote cooperation in teaching and research in biotechnology. UMBC is achieving this international success by playing to its strength -- building on partnerships, both on and off campus.
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Pudong officials learned that Maryland might be the place to go to train its
top medical administrators through Kevin Lu, general manager of the
Pan-American Investment Consulting Corporation, a private consulting company in
Washington, D.C. Other universities in the state expressed interest in the
arrangement, but offered more campus-anchored approaches than UMBC, says
Bili Mattes, who directs the Professional Learning Institute for Continuing Education. The formal offer to UMBC to provide the training was made by the Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.
With southeastern China's economy acquiring a free-market cast, the topic of "how and why and to whom hospitals market" was also compelling, Riley says. Mattes stresses that the Chinese administrators were interested in adapting -- not absorbing -- a model. "My understanding is that their focus is on learning as much as possible about the U.S. model of health care administration, not to mirror the United States, but to use what they learn to improve health care administration in their own country."
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