Starter Kit. Idea 300 of 500. Cluster 15

Typing up doctors' notes and reading scans for foreign hospitals, overnight, to their standard

Back to the idea

Written for this site as a starting point, not from the book. Rules and fees change: ask the bodies named below before you spend money.

The mechanism, from the book

The proof exists in Malabe. What is missing is a thousand small versions of it.

The first step

Start with transcription, the simpler half: contact the practice managers of 10 private clinics abroad and offer a free week of transcribing dictated letters, returned by the next morning in their format. Ask what they pay now and to what accuracy standard. A paid contract after the trial is the proof, and it becomes the reference a radiology service will need later.

Who pays first
A private clinic abroad whose doctors dictate letters at the end of the day and want them typed and checked by morning.
What leaves today
Medical staff trained here emigrate to do this work, while the overnight time difference would let them do it from home.

Ask first

  • Data Protection Authority. Ask what rules apply to handling patients' records sent from hospitals abroad.
  • Sri Lanka Medical Council. Ask whether reading scans for foreign hospitals needs any registration here.

Check before you spend

Whether the hospitals' own regulators allow overseas reading, which privacy rules govern patient records, and whether radiologists need registration in the hospital's country.

Find out these three numbers

  1. What does a clinic abroad pay per transcribed letter today?
  2. What accuracy standard do the clinics write into their contracts?
  3. How many letters a night would one clinic send?

A comparison from the book

Costa Rica after Intel. Chapter Eleven

"But the trained technicians stayed, the suppliers stayed, and the skill of meeting the world's safety rules stayed."

Meeting a foreign standard is a skill that stays here and keeps earning after the first client.

The test

Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?

WITH500BUSINESS IDEASTO STARTTOMORROW

From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.