Health Care Council hosting Swedish business delegation

Group interested in Nashville health care innovations, relationships with local industry leaders

Email | Print By Erin Lawley

The Nashville Health Care Council will host a delegation of Swedish businesspeople the week of Nov. 2.

The group, an estimated 14 people in health care, academia and related organizations, will attend the NHCC’s Nov. 2 event on health and well-being and meet with representatives from several local health care organizations.

The trip is a follow-up to the trade mission the NHCC and Nashville Area Chamber of Commerce sponsored last September that took 33 Nashville executives to Stockholm, Sweden and Berlin, Germany. A group from Sweden also visited Nashville in December 2008.

“The fact that two Swedish delegations have visited Nashville since the Council’s mission to Sweden last year demonstrates the strength and attractiveness of the Nashville health cluster,” said NHCC President Caroline Young in an e-mail to NashvillePost.com. Young is among a group of Nashville business leaders currently attending a trade mission to China with Gov. Phil Bredesen.

Visiting delegates include representatives from the following organizations:

• School of Health Sciences, Jönköping University, a school of 2,000 undergraduate and graduate students.

• ACG Nyström, an international provider of equipment for the embroidery, textile, sewing and cutting industry.

• CapMan Group, a private-equity fund manager.

• The Swedish Association of the Pharmaceutical Industry, a trade association representing the Swedish research-based pharmaceutical industry.

• Swecare Foundation, a nonprofit organization that works to promote global relationships for Swedish health care companies and organizations. Swecare is the trip's organizer.

• The Swedish Trade Council, which provides services required for establishing and growing Swedish companies internationally.

• Uppsala Care, a service of Uppsala University Hospital that provides specialist health care for patients from around the world.

• Praktikertjänst, a producer cooperative for commercially operated dental and health care companies.

Young said the group is interested in learning about innovations generated by Nashville’s entrepreneurial health care community and continuing to build relationships with local industry leaders.

According to the Council, the group will meet with officials from Skanska USA Building, Healthways, Meharry Medical College, Vanderbilt University Medical Center, HCA, Emdeon, AmSurg, BioMimetic Therapeutics and Sarah Cannon Cancer Center.

Mendy Mazzo, vice president of business development for Skanska in Nashville, which has a focus on health care construction management, said her firm is hosting a lunch for the delegation. Because Skanska’s headquarters is in Sweden, representatives from the Nashville office attended the trade mission abroad and hosted Swedish delegates for dinner last year.

Although Mazzo said her firm would love to develop business relationships out of the meeting, she considers the gathering mostly for informational purposes.

“From our point of view, it’s more about learning about health care in Sweden and sharing with them our perspective of health care in the U.S.,” she said.

The visit comes during a time of intense debate over health reform that has included much discussion of how the U.S. health care system stacks up against the systems of other countries in terms of quality and costs.

Sweden, with a government-run health care system that provides universal coverage, spent about 9.1 percent of its gross domestic product on health in 2008, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. The U.S. spent 16 percent of its GDP on health care that year, according to the OECD.