The integration of medical and elderly care business models in private hospitals has a high feasibility, mainly reflected in the following aspects: Policy Support: The government has introduced multiple policies to support the development of private hospitals, encouraging social capital to enter the healthcare sector, providing policy guarantees for the integration of medical and elderly care services in private hospitals. At the same time, the improvement of relevant laws and regulations related to healthcare and elderly care can better protect the rights of the elderly and provide more standardized services when private hospitals offer integrated services.
High Market Demand: By the end of 2024, the population aged 60 and above in China will exceed 310 million, accounting for 22% of the national population. The increase in the elderly population has driven a growing demand for elderly health services. The traditional model of “separation of medical and elderly care” is increasingly unable to meet the multidimensional health needs of the elderly in terms of disease management, functional maintenance, and psychological support. The integrated model of medical and elderly care in private hospitals can meet this “urgent need.”
Efficient Resource Utilization: Many private hospitals have low bed occupancy rates in certain wards, leading to resource idleness. By making light modifications to these vacant spaces, they can quickly be repurposed for integrated medical and elderly care, bringing additional revenue to the institutions. For example, transforming some internal medicine and rehabilitation wards into nursing units or rehabilitation care areas can introduce basic nursing, chronic disease management, and postoperative rehabilitation services.
Flexible Service Models: Different scales of private hospitals can choose suitable integrated medical and elderly care models based on their own advantages. Tertiary private hospitals can leverage their resource capital advantages to add palliative care and psychiatric beds, and establish new elderly care beds, extending short-term medical services into long-term care; secondary private hospitals can utilize their specialty advantages to add elderly care beds or transform into tertiary rehabilitation hospitals to implement integrated services; primary private hospitals can convert existing beds into elderly care beds, palliative care beds, and rehabilitation beds, creating community integrated care centers.
Strong Technical Support: Continuous advancements in medical technology provide technical support for private hospitals to carry out integrated medical and elderly care. The application of technologies such as telemedicine and smart medical devices can improve service quality and efficiency. The development of information technology also provides better information management and service quality monitoring tools for private hospitals.
Differentiated Competitive Advantage: Private hospitals can achieve differentiated competition with the public healthcare system through integrated medical and elderly care. For the general public, grassroots private hospitals can meet basic medical and elderly care needs through community embedded services, becoming a supplementary force to the public healthcare system; for high-net-worth elderly groups, they can offer high-end services such as private health management, cross-border medical resource integration, and anti-aging treatments, forming a differentiated competitive zone from traditional public systems.
Increased Hospital Revenue: Private hospitals can improve resource utilization and increase revenue through integrated medical and elderly care. For instance, a certain secondary general hospital in Beijing transformed its idle neurology ward into a “medical care-type elderly care unit,” increasing the bed turnover rate from 65% to 92%, resulting in a composite revenue structure of 1:0.8 for medical income to care income.
Enhanced Service Stickiness: Private hospitals can extend some services to nursing homes or elderly care facilities, creating integrated health and care services. For example, by leveraging specialized capabilities in elderly rehabilitation, post-stroke recovery, and orthopedic rehabilitation, they can enhance service differentiation, increase customer stickiness, and improve brand recognition.
Optimized Resource Allocation: A private hospital group in Shanghai has established “embedded medical cooperation” with 12 elderly care institutions in the region, forming a graded service network through the deployment of medical teams, co-building smart health stations, and establishing two-way referral channels. This cooperation has led to a 42% reduction in pressure ulcer incidence in elderly care institutions and a 65% decrease in emergency referral rates, while also bringing a stable chronic disease management patient group to the hospital. Here are some examples of support for the elderly care industry: Yantai Xingfu Elderly Care Home received provincial funding support: Yantai Xingfu Elderly Care Co., Ltd. obtained 3.5 million yuan in provincial budget funds by leveraging the pilot project for community embedded service facilities, along with an additional 1 million yuan in service industry guidance funds. The Development and Reform Bureau of Zhifu District formed a policy service team to identify funding for the construction of elderly rehabilitation stations in hospitals and communities, matching guidance funds with the need to enhance professional service capabilities, and providing one-on-one guidance to help enterprises successfully apply.
Song County strengthens policy support for elderly care services: Song County actively integrates resources, following the principle of “building a batch, renovating a batch, revitalizing a batch, and transferring a batch” to address the shortcomings in elderly care service facilities, adding 45 community elderly care service facilities and 210 rural elderly care stations. At the same time, it introduced three elderly care service institutions to pilot public-private projects and brought in 17 market entities to provide elderly meal assistance services, enhancing the sustainable operational capacity of elderly care service facilities. Shanghai Fushou Kang became a designated service institution for long-term care insurance: Shanghai Fushou Kang became one of the first designated service institutions when long-term care insurance was piloted in Shanghai in 2013. Driven by policy dividends, its business scale rapidly expanded, reaching 100,000 service users by the end of 2014 and 1 million by the end of 2017, currently covering over 60 cities with an annual revenue close to 1 billion yuan.