Update from Dr. Jonathan Seah, Re: ParkwayHealth

Posted By Damjan DeNoble

Yesterday I wrote an article called What’s happening at ParkwayHealth Shanghai? where I asked whether or not ParkwayHealth’s recently negative PR  may stem from a managerial vacuum.  The focus of the article was two fold.

The first focus was a series of recent online complaints tied together by two common strands – 1) ParkwayHealth was understaffed, and 2)  the billing, check in, and check out processes were poorly managed.

The second focus was former ParkwayHealth China & North Asia Division President (CEO), Dr. Jonathan Seah.   I wondered whether or not his leaving ParkwayHealth at the end of 2008 was somehow responsible for the apparent downturn in the service quality I was seeing reported by ParkwayHealth customers.  I also said that we had heard that Dr. Seah’s leaving was not his choice.  Though I was careful not to intimate anything beyond what I had heard, I worried, too, that my comments did not over reach and cause any sort of unneeded trouble.

After the article was published, I sent a copy to Dr. Seah, and he was kind enough to send back an email clarifying his break with ParkwayHealth, and providing some useful information for current ParkwayHealth customers.  While I will not reprint his letter in full, I do provide below the relevant parts of Dr. Seah’s email, that I feel are intended for reprint on the blog.

I did read your blog and thank you for your good observations and insights. Do allow me to contemplate it for a bit and I will send you some thoughts in a few days.

There is only one minor factual error in your blog that I feel I should point out: I chose to leave Parkway last year under very amicable circumstances, and consider the current Chairman, the Group CEO, and the ParkwayHealth CEO to be very good friends of mine still (I have in fact been catching up with them here in Singapore over the past few days). The main reason I left, which I shared with senior management and my team, was that over the previous couple of years since the World Link transaction, I had personally become much more interested in projects involving the domestic consumer/patient base. Given that this new space is still very much in a nascent phase (where profitable business models still have to be developed and validated), and almost certainly require organizations whose very “DNA” are local from the ground-up (cost, culture, price, etc), and therefore not terribly synergistic with the existing Parkway operations (which are very cash flow positive and profitable already), I decided to help form an organization that would be better able to focus and support these newer, local, companies, through the application of venture capital and with a little bit of the knowledge that we’ve accumulated over the past 5 years in China. Who knows – we might end up partnering with ParkwayHealth in the future on some projects!

….

With regard to the other points – I certainly have to agree that there are many areas that ParkwayHealth is still working very hard to improve today – change doesn’t happen quickly – and I would beg your readers for more patience as every one in the organization is truly trying very hard. However, I can share with you that at least up to the point I left at the start of this year, our Press Ganey scores …did show our service levels improving every month. Parkway’s growth in China this year is likely to be even greater than last year, as we spent much of last year recruiting a few more “truly international” specialists into the system – such as full-time ophthalmologists and orthopedic surgeons, renovating Shanghai Gleneagles to be even more patient-friendly, and writing off/cleaning up most of the remaining “small company issues” that had been present at World Link prior to our acquisition of its clinics. I also have a lot of confidence in Jeff – the new chap we found to helm our China clinics – he had many years of experience as a consultant at iSOS in Singapore before joining us at the end of last year. The new business development team, now headquartered in Singapore under a great guy, also have very good people who spend a lot of time in China working on growth projects for Parkway.

Thank you Dr. Seah for providing a clarification of your relationship with ParkwayHealth, and I wish you luck in your new venture capital project.

ParkwayHealth customers, what do you think?