The city’s top private clinics will launch a St. Petersburg medical association by the end of this year to defend the industry against “shady, half-legal medical offices,” uncooperative insurance firms, and staff pinching.
Eight clinics have already “agreed on the general need and direction of this situation,” said Tamaz Mchelidze, president of dentistry and cosmetology chain Medi, with details to be settled in a process that has already totaled four industry meetings over two weeks.
In the case of late-paying insurance companies, some clinics say they would not rule out extreme action like going to the Arbitration Court to settle disputes, transferring to a system of pre-payment for medical services provided to clients of those insurers, or even blocking them altogether.
“Stability [on the medical market] can only be ensured through transparent rules that respect the law. A first step towards [this stability] will be the creation of a self-regulating industry association,” Mchelidze said.
The initiative to create an association as an industry monitoring body and a lobby group began with a Jul. 14 meeting of 16 of the city’s top private clinics that hold up to 80 percent of the private healthcare market.
While the problem of late payments from some — not all — insurers was a “universally backed,” said Alexander Abdin, head doctor at Euromed, the idea was not to boycott “difficult” insurance companies, but “to show the insurance industry that the topic is an important one for the clinics.”
Since mid-July, the idea of a regulatory association has turned into a mini-row with a few insurance firms, although the private clinics insist that it was not the only bone of contention in the medical profession, nor the root reason for the moves towards unification.
“If [late payments from insurers] is the only cause, it makes no sense to unite into an association,” said Yefim Danilovich, head of the American Medical Clinic. “We are more interested in [solving the issue of] staff pinching, of industry price regulations.”
Abdin adds that the association could keep a database of troublesome patients and untrustworthy, disloyal staff. It could even conduct ratings of the city’s private hospitals, he said.
“The corporate force is being gathered to instill trust into our profession,” Mchelidze. About eight clinics, plus several members of an existing Medical Ward association, will invest their own capital to ensure order and transparency in the city’s private healthcare industry, he said.
By Yuriy Humber