The global healthcare industry is among the most dynamic and rapidly growing industries in the world economy. Demand for healthcare is likely to expand in the future based on the stimulated demographic shifts such as the increase in the number of elderly people, extended longevity; and a rise in lifestyle diseases. Hence, the consumers’ awareness on the importance of healthcare services have grown and accessibility to obtain these services have also improved.

Not too long ago, if you would like to set up a new private hospital, the approval alone required more than 800 days – roughly 2.2 years. But when new regulatory initiatives were introduced in 2017, the whole process was cut down to 300 days in 2019.

Now, imagine if we can reduce this to 100 days.

Faster approval process for new private hospitals

Well, now we can. To boost productivity and economic growth of private healthcare, the Malaysia Productivity Corporation (MPC) supported by the Private Healthcare Productivity Nexus (PHPN) will introduce initiatives that cover three (3) key areas:

Regulation,
Technology and Innovation, and
Workforce and Performance
To speed up the application process to set up a new private hospital, new guidelines and online permit application will be introduced. The improvements will be ready later this year and are expected to shorten the application process to be less than 100 days.

Better Regulation
Reducing the regulatory burden (and layers of approvals), private healthcare will soon benefit from improved regulation in advertisement practices. This upgrade is expected to make RM2.1 billion in healthcare travel revenue for the country, and boost the economy in sectors such as accommodation, transportation, food and beverages and retail.

Technology and Innovation
In this area, the initiative brings forward Public-Private Partnership (PPP), a business model that enables public and private hospitals to share resources and facilities. It’s a win-win scenario: private sector can participate more and public facilities can be improved!

Workforce and Performance
A hospital is as good as the people behind it. To help solve the shortage of medical specialists in of the country, the initiative will also identify, and help selected private hospitals to be specialty training centres in high demand areas of medicine. To help support this, a standard framework will be developed for private hospitals as specialty training centres.