Circle Health

Source: Exec Digital UK

Date :08/07/2008 10:22:34

Remodelling healthcare

Written by Rebecca Waters and Produced by Paul Radbourne

“It’s a business that was created in order to redefine people’s expectations of healthcare,” Ali Parsa, Company’s Managing Partner, explains when asked to describe the Circle. “To simplify it and make it accessible to everybody and put the people who deliver it in charge.”

The Circle Partnership is made up of each and every Circle employee from the clinician, nurse, manager to the support staff and each partner is an owner of the business. This process has been very successful. Circle now has 1100 consultants as part of its Partnership – the largest partnership of consultants ever – and in six months it is already the largest GP partnership in the country. Putting this into perspective, two out of every three surgeons who have a private practice in the South of England (outside London) are a member and an owner of Circle and a member of the Partnership.

MAKING A CHANGE

You could say that building businesses is Parsa’s strength. Having arrived in the UK from Iran when he was 16, Parsa put himself through education, gaining a degree in Engineering. This was followed by a PHD after he built a business which he subsequently sold. Naturally, this led Parsa to a career in investment banking, starting at Credit Suisse First Boston, moving on to Merrill Lynch and Goldman Sachs; his job almost every time, to help build a business.

“After having our first child my wife and I sat back and said one of us needs to make a change,” Parsa says. Consequently he quit his investment banking job and started looking at becoming an investor and an entrepreneur again.

“I made one or two investments that did well and then a doctor approached me, who was a friend of mine and said ‘I want to build my own hospital, will you invest and help me do it?’” he explains. After looking into the process, it was decided that rather than building a hospital, the best thing was to create a national business which would help every doctor do the same. In 2004, Circle – formerly Centre of Clinical Excellence – was created.

Parsa explains: “When we first started, we looked at the healthcare sector and said, fundamentally, three things are happening right now that is making the delivery of healthcare, as it currently is, unsustainable. One is the ageing population and the prosperity of that population; the age is bringing with it bigger occurrences of problems such as obesity and diabetes. Secondly, we are having an arrival of technology in healthcare in a way that has never happened before and thirdly, the consumers of healthcare have fundamentally changed.”

RE-ENGINEERING

Circle subsequently hired a number of individuals from the Department of Health and Kings Fund to help an understanding of the healthcare industry; spending six months to a year discussing what to do.

Parsa says: “We came up with four conclusions that formed our view: The first is about creating partnerships; the second is about bringing great design and redefining what the whole infrastructure of healthcare should look like. The third was about changing the operations of healthcare and the fourth was the redefining of the technology of healthcare - for instance can we make it a lot more user-friendly?”

This formed Circle’s unique business model; creating a professional services organisation that it is run bottom-up, with professionals i.e. doctors and nurses responsible for the delivery and management of services.

DELIVERY OF HEALTHCARE

Circle began with the foremost aim of providing accessible and integrated healthcare for its patients - and to empower those who deliver care to tailor services to their patient’s needs - to bring healthcare into the 21st century and make the industry viable again.

“In the 1940s and 50s we re-engineered an unsustainable food distribution business and overcame rationing, in the sixties we did it with retail, in the seventies with manufacturing, in the 80s we did it with the financial services and we’ve just finished doing it to telecom and airlines. And every single time: better; more democratic, more accessible, more unimaginable services and products have been created . We thought that needs to happen to healthcare,” explains Parsa. To start, he says, you need to reengineer the infrastructure of healthcare.

“Our average private hospital is 30 years old; an average NHS hospital is 50 years old. Using these hospitals is like driving these 1950s cars that roam the street of Havana, the only reason they are there - they are not fit for purpose anymore – it is because nobody has invested in a new generation of them like the rest of the world has.” As Parsa says, this is going to take time and effort.

“This is not going to be about buying a bunch of hospitals and turning them around and selling them, it is going to be about a fundamental re-engineering of delivery of care and therefore we need to create a platform from which we can grow.”

BUILDING A SUSTAINABLE MODEL

Circle is committed to about 21 locations right now, which will be opening in the next three years, and have either been built, are in design, or have got planning permission. As Parsa explains, these bring risks so it’s a matter of bringing in good people to manage the developments in order to build a sustainable model.

“We’re going to be here for a very long period of time and the only way you can do that successfully is by creating a supply chain who each do their bit very well and bring all of these people into our circle,” he says. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement; “they become better hospital designers and we build better and better designed hospitals,” Parsa explains.

The design and construction of Circle hospitals and clinics constitute a central part of its patient-centric approach. Typically it has been carefully considered.

“If you deconstruct a hospital, 40 percent of it is no more than an office, another 30 percent of it is no more than a hotel and it’s only another 30 percent of it that is really clinical. So we said ‘let’s design 40 percent of it like it’s a magnificent office, let’s design the 30 percent of it that is like a great hotel and let’s design the 30 percent that should be a hospital like a hospital’.”

REGENERATION

Alongside this, Circle promotes an environmentally sustainable approach to the design and construction, not because it is fashionable, because it makes “good business sense to do things for the environment”. This is expressed through efficient uses of energy, the adoption of environmentally-friendly materials and the implementation of corporate social responsibility.

“I think healthcare, education and the environment are the most sustainable regeneration of our wealth, and it’s something that our country needs to get good at.”

Circle already has ideas about how it could contribute to education and has plans for some of its hospitals to be created in research centres; building research and training.

The group is also looking at growing into the GP community and primary care community; looking further at the delivery of healthcare and how they deliver it in people’s homes. There are also plans to build at least 50 clinics over the next few years; there is no room for short-termism.

As Parsa maintains, “I don’t think you can create something significant by doing it for a couple of years. I guess it’s the result of the video game generation, we just want instant satisfaction and I don’t think it happens like that, it just takes time and it takes effort.”

Click here to view the corporate brochure on Circle Health