Business Ideas in Romania

Outsourced X-rays

• Posted by Sara on December 26th, 2006 filed in Services

Opportunity: Outsourcing medical information processing

Medical residents in Romania are notoriously underpaid and face a daunting fight if they want to obtain a position in a hospital in a major city. Many of them are highly motivated and have studied hard, although they may not be readily familiar with the latest in medical technology.

The highest hope for a large number of residents is in obtaining a position in one of the Western countries that face a lack of sufficient doctors - Great Britain, France, Italy, Canada are favorite target countries. In order to achieve this goal, medical residents undertake a long, arduous preparation to undergo successive examination stages. There are many months of waiting after receiving the results of one stage and before the next examination goes on.

The latent skills of these young people, already certified by having successfully completed initial testing stages, could be used by an entrepreneur who would use their services to offer outsourcing services to understaffed medical facilities in developed countries (depending on the relevant legislation, of course). They could analyse medical test results (including X-rays, EKGs, EEGs, blood test results) and process medical data.

Canada might be a very good target, as Romanian medical diplomas are recognized there, and the timezone difference would enable results to be processed during Canadian nighttime and sent back in the morning.

This type of outsourcing is already successfully done by radiologists in India for US small- and medium-sized hospitals, as Thomas Friedman points out in “The World is Flat”.

If you have friends who want to leave, would they be interested? Do you know of any other good target countries?