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Global Conversations with: Leonard Karp, President and CEO of Philadelphia International Medicine

Posted on July 27, 2012

Kathleen Quigley, for GPA -- For over ten years, Philadelphia International Medicine has been combining some of the best doctors in the region to treat patients from all over the world in Philadelphia, as well as to train medical communities internationally in hospital methodology. Leonard Karp, PIM’s CEO and President, leads the initiatives to take what Philadelphia has to offer and give it back to the globe.

As Global Philadelphia Association’s Executive Director Zabeth Teelucksingh learned in her interview with Leonard, PIM is not just about celebrating Philadelphia’s excellence in medicine, but also its inviting cultural atmosphere that helps international patients and visitors feel welcome during their stays in the city. 

Continue reading for Mr. Karp's thoughts on:

How did you come to live in Philadelphia?
Well, I came here as a student [at Temple]. I was an out of state student that came here and just stayed. That was 42 years ago, so I guess I’m an official Philadelphian now.

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You are President and CEO of Philadelphia International Medicine, and I was wondering if you could share with our readers what exactly it is your organization does.

The goal of the organization is to expand the footprint of our owner hospitals overseas. And we have three focus areas. One is obviously patient care, so we bring patients here from all over the world so they can get their healthcare in Philadelphia. The second thing we do is, if you look at a hospital, it’s not just a building. What it really is are the people inside it.  So we look at the talents and skills of the people inside the hospital and say, ‘how can we attract international audiences for them?’ One way to do that is to tap into their expertise, so for instance we have a training program that we do with other hospitals around that world.

One of them that we’re doing is Barbados and Bermuda on Monday. Another way we tap into that expertise is to use them as faculty for week-long seminars that we put on. We did one for a group from Brazil last October, and I just got confirmation today that we will be working with the Jeddah Chamber of Commerce, and we will be doing a live by video conference with our hospital administrators here so that the hospital administrators in Saudi Arabia can better learn how to run a hospital. So we’re very excited about that.

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That’s wonderful. So it’s not only a medical aspect.
As I said, we look at the entire hospital community. It could be nursing, hospital administrators, physicians, surgeons- it’s the entire community. And we look at how we can tap into that to get an international audience for them.

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Would you mind listing the hospitals you work with?
It’s six hospitals. The owners of Philadelphia International Medicine are Fox Chase Cancer Center, Temple University Hospital, and Thomas Jefferson University Hospital. Then we also have service agreements with duPont Hospital for Children in Wilmington, McGee Rehab Hospital, and Wills Eye Institute. We also work with a home health company, a dialysis company, and we’re negotiating now with a long-term care facility.

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It sounds to me as if what you’re doing is growing in terms of a concept, and so your company is growing.
On that point, in terms of our patient volume, and the revenue we bring for the hospitals here is up 80% from last year, which is quite an achievement because the same pressures that we feel economically in the States is global, and to expand globally is a little difficult now, and we’re getting back to where we were pre-recession.

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And what about the actual countries involved? I know that you spoke about the Caribbean, the Middle East, and Latin America. Are those your target areas?
We service the world, and so we get out patients from anywhere, and we do. There are very few countries from where we’ve not had one patient. We’ve been in existence since 1999, so we’ve got some history behind us. But our primary focuses are the Middle East, the Caribbean, and Canada. We’re now in the process of looking at expansion areas, and we have some ideas about where we want to be in the next five years, and we’re starting to take initial steps to get there.

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Would you mind sharing with me what the interface areas are with Canada? One would have thought they are pretty similar to the US.
The opportunities from Canada have to do with their health system. Their health system provides extremely good primary care, but for specialty care there are long waiting lines. And if you have cancer or you need to see a specialist quickly, chances are you’ll opt to come to the United States. Canadians travel all over the world for their health care, and we see quite a number of cancer patients from Canada. That’s the primary reason they come here.

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What about language? Is English the shared language, or do you sometimes find you have to use translators? And how does language play in the business you’re involved in?
It works two ways. When I travel abroad, English is the language of medicine around the world. So I could go to a hospital in Saudi Arabia, I could go to a hospital in Korea, or China, and chances are English is spoken there. But for the patients, obviously that is not the case, and so we provide interpreter services for any of our patients who need them.

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Why do you think this business has grown in the city of Philadelphia specifically?
We’d like to think we’ve had some role in that, but if you look at the concentration of health care resources in Philadelphia, the medical schools here, the research that’s being done- this is the epicenter of American medicine. When you have that concentration of resources and the exciting work that’s being done in medicine here- there’s journal articles printed, there’s global audiences coming here for medical conventions, and they learn about things that our patients learn, and doctors learn about what is happening here in Philadelphia- it makes our job a little easier. Actually, the physicians are our marketing vehicle. They’re the ones who are known overseas, and we are a facilitator in that.

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How did the group from Brazil get to interplay in Philadelphia? Did they get a chance to enjoy the city?
The Brazilian group absolutely loves coming here. They’ve been here a half a dozen times now. There’s usually about 30-35 of them. They’re all physicians or mid-level hospital administrators and they all come here as part of their MBA program in Brazil to gain hands-on training here with their peers. Then they go back home and move up the ladder in their hospitals. The last group liked it here so much. They had been on a three site rotation, so they had been one year here, one year Boston, and one year in Barcelona. They had such a good time here, and they’re now going to come here exclusively, so we’re pretty excited about that.

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With a group that size, how long do they stay?
They stay for a week. They don’t fill up all the hotels, but this is a group that loves life. They go out, they shop, they go to restaurants. The group that was here a couple months ago made well-use out of all the cultural amenities of the city. They even went to Independence Hall. I know they were at the orchestra; they were at the theater, even though they speak Portuguese. One of their favorite places was Victor Café- they loved the opera.

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Global Philadelphia is all about putting Philadelphia on the map internationally, and one of the things we’ve realized is that sports plays a big part in that. We’re talking more of the niche sports, which are soccer, cricket, squash, and others. As I’m speaking to you I’m thinking to myself does sports medicine play a role in part of these traveling doctors, or not specifically?
No, but I can give you a story about sports. A couple of years ago, we had a patient and her son here. The son, who didn’t speak English and who really had never left Saudi Arabia, was here helping his mom. They were here for about five months, and it coincided with the football season. He had never seen a football game, and didn’t even really know American football, he just knew soccer in Saudi Arabia. At the end of his time here he spoke English, though it was mostly sports talk, and he really loved the Eagles. He followed every game and got an Eagles hat and Eagles shirt, and kept following them. So sports play an important role- they’re definitely a bridge. But in terms of sports medicine, what we do sometimes see are foreign students who are here in school and get hurt either in clubs, activities or something like that, and they need to see an orthopedist.

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Obviously you travel a great deal. How many days out of the year are you out of the country, roughly?
Well, mostly what I do is on phone or email, or other forms of communication, but it’s probably about a month out of the year that I’m out.

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And when you’re traveling, what do you like the most and what do you miss about Philadelphia?
What you like the most about being overseas is meeting the people. For instance, I was in Saudi Arabia in May, and I had an incredible time, and they’re just such open, warm people. It’s pretty much the same wherever you go. I’d say family is what I miss the most.

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Is there a gizmo you can’t do without?
Well, I’m still using a BlackBerry. I couldn’t leave the office without my staff being able to get in touch with me constantly. The time difference is such that it doesn’t matter. We also use Skype and video to keep in touch if anything is needed.

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Would you mind sharing what your favorite restaurant is, and where you like to take customers?
One thing I don’t do is if I have a group from Brazil or the Middle East, I don’t take them to a restaurant of their own cuisine. What I want to do is show them Philadelphia in a different way. Depending on who is here, it really determines where I want to go. There are so many great choices, where can you go wrong?

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Is there anything else you’d like to add? With your traveling and the work that you do, you really do have a global outlook which a lot of us may not have, and it’s very current. 
We have a whole series of things. We also do consulting work for hospitals overseas and governments. A couple of years ago, we did two major projects in Korea, and we designed academic medical centers, one for Incheon and one for Jeju, which is an island off of Korea. What we’re able to do, because we go out and find these projects, we look at the entire Philadelphia Community and see how we can involve them in the work that we’re doing, and branch out who we are. For the Korea projects, we brought Philadelphia architects to do the site planning and estimators to estimate the cost. We look at a project and think how we can maximize the Philadelphia presence in the project.

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You’ve given your time to Global Philadelphia to help plan International Month in 2013. How do you think Philadelphia International Medicine will use this opportunity, and how do you think Philadelphia as a whole will benefit from it?
If the timing is right, we’d hope our Brazilian group is back here during that time. They will have all of those calendar events to find things to do. We probably have 10-15 patients from other countries here at any one time, and they’ll have a whole host of variety of things to do, and they’re usually here with their families, and we hope to be a contributor to that week, as well.

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Great. Len, thank you very much for your time.
Thank you.

This interview with Leonard Karp has been edited and condensed from its original form. Edited by Kathleen Quigley.