Outsourcing Medical Services

In the postwar contemporary world, the outsourcing of medical services started with larger [Page 1231]hospitals from the cities and wealthier urban areas leasing out some of their functions to smaller hospitals in the countryside. This subsection elaborates on the four broadly interrelated developments during the 1980s and 1990s that allowed the intercontinental outsourcing of medical services. First, the sheer extent and expansiveness of globalization in the 1980s necessitated the development of technology that diffused the location of medical services from one part of the globe to another. New technologies that rapidly linearized time and compressed space allowed different health service centers to coordinate and synchronize in different locations simultaneously. New platforms such as Skype, e-mail, and Viber, and statistical tools such as Stata and R, ...