In this unique interview, Dr. David Peng, CEO of Medical Excellence International (China), shares the company´s foundations, its key milestones as well as its two unique membership programs. He further reveals how Medical Excellence is committed to connect its members to the best medical institutions and physicians around the world within a week’s time. Additionally, he reminds us that health is the ultimate luxury and it needs to be well taken care of!
Mr. Peng, can you first introduce Medical Excellence to our international audience?
About nine years ago, Founder and Chairman John Prufeta started Medical Excellence International in New York. He wanted to help and connect high net worth individuals (HNWIs) from Europe – especially Eastern Europe and Russia – to top US medical institutions for better medical treatments. He managed to become very successful, especially with Russian clients, as more than half of the top 50 wealthiest Russians became his clients, including billionaire Mr. Roman Abramovich. When the current biggest shareholder, CV Starr Companies, run by Mr. Maurice Greenberg, decided to invest in Medical Excellence’s entry into China, Roman Abramovich was eager to be a shareholder as well.
When Mr. Greenberg suggested to his old friend, Mr. Prufeta, to apply the same concept in China, Mr. Prufeta argued he did not know the market well enough, to which Mr. Greenberg amusingly replied, it does not matter, because he knows the Chinese market; Mr. Greenberg is, of course, known as ‘the China man’ in the US. This is how Medical Excellence set up a wholly owned subsidiary in Hong Kong, which later set up Medical Excellence China Limited.
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What are the services offered by Medical Excellence?
We act as a family office within the healthcare domain, exclusively serving our club members. In essence, we manage the health of HNWIs and their family members.
We offer two membership options. The first, the Life Membership, is a preventative program that enables our members to enjoy a comprehensive and tailor-made health check-up annually in the hospitals within our network in New York, London or China. Usually, we encourage them to go to New York to access the best medical resources. This health screening is fully tailor-made according to the individual member’s health conditions, objectives and medical history, and our team of healthcare consultants devise an itinerary specific to the individual’s needs. Each member will be accompanied by a personal Mandarin-speaking health adviser, and we also manage the logistics of their health visits if necessary. Such personalized health check-ups enable us to provide our members with a full picture of their health as well as a personalized healthcare regimen afterwards.
This membership also covers the ‘interventional’ aspect: should a medical issue arise during or independent of the annual screening, we then arrange appointments with the physicians most suited to dealing with that particular problem. Typically, with these highly-regarded doctors, the minimum waiting time is one month. Our company’s promise is that we can secure an appointment within a week – and I am proud to say that thus far, we have never failed to deliver this promise, thanks to our strong relationships within the global medical network.
While we arrange the appointments, our members make their own provisions regarding payment for any treatments. Due to our extensive network, however, in the US, our members are also able to enjoy discounts on their medical bills.
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Our second membership is called Global Medpass, a membership-only access that covers the above-mentioned interventional aspect only. It also excludes access to our Chinese medical network. Clients that choose this membership often have very severe or complicated diseases, and the usual treatments they have access to might have failed. This is why they come to us to see if we can offer help within our available medical resources.
To summarize, those two memberships are very valuable to our members, because they provide them with the fastest access to the best medical institutions and physicians at a competitive price. The best spokesperson is in fact Mr. Wei, a businessman in Beijing, who found out he had early kidney cancer while accompanying his parents for a health checkup two years ago. To make sure he received the best treatment, he contacted a Beijing-based company offering a similar service to that of Medical Excellence. But he had to wait over a month before an appointment with the right doctor was made. Can you imagine the uncertainty, anguish and stress he experienced in that period of time? While the operation turned out to be very successful, the experience was terrible for him – and after he told me this story when I met him about a year ago, we realized that not only he waited for a longer period of time to get to the US, but also the fees he paid for that service was much higher than the fees charged by Medical Excellence! He is now one of our most supportive spokesperson and represents our company in Beijing.
The United States definitely has the best medical care in the world, but what about connecting your members to hospitals from other parts of the world, such as in Europe, Singapore or even China?
We do not limit our services to connecting our members to the US, but also to other parts of the world, depending on where the best doctor is for the specific kind of disease. So we not only refer Chinese patients to the US, but we are also referring Chinese patients to top Chinese hospitals and in some cases we are working on referring Russian patients to Chinese hospitals as well. I personally accompanied a very successful Russian businessman to see a traditional Chinese medicine doctor, where western medicine had failed.
What would be your final message to our C-level executives?
As our company slogan says, “Great Health is the Ultimate Luxury”. As C-level executives, your global readers must have done very well in their career, but now they should also pay good attention to their health or they should engage a health management professional to help them do so just like they have legal matters to lawyers and financial matters to accountants. Otherwise, their empires or businesses built over the years may not last! Good health is the key to enable them to run their businesses longer. I cannot think of a better example other than Mr. M. R. Greenberg himself, who is now 93 years old, still in good health and travelling to China at least twice a year!
