• RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG is recognised as a health service provider with highest standards in patient-orientation, quality and good value of its services. We are also known as a hospital operator whose primary tool for efficiency enhancements and process optimisation in hospitals is investing. Our readiness to invest in considerable orders of magnitude is evidence to the long-term nature of our business approach. This explains why our concepts are suitable for long-term partnerships, exclusively. It’s only logical that such orientation towards the long term is also reflected in our relations with investors: Capital-givers value our shares as a long-term investment; RHÖN-KLINIKUM shareholders not only harmonise with our philosophy but their long-term exposure in our shares makes them an integral part of it. 
   
   
  
• We stand up for broad, blanket-coverage healthcare provision, ensuring every patient will receive the hospital services he or she needs, anywhere and at any time. This makes us a natural partner of public hospital owners who are concerned about the efficiency of their health service infrastructure and its competitiveness in the medium or long term. Our interest is centred on providing optimal care for all patients, ensuring high availability of services on short distances and the required qualitative specialisation – all this combined with high operating efficiency. We believe that any public hospital owner will subscribe to these targets. This gives us supports in our focusing mainly on take-overs of acute hospitals included in the regional hospital plans of the federal states. In line with our general goal, we target the entire spectre, including primary care and specialised hospitals, major general hospitals offering defined specialties as well as maximum care centres and university hospitals. 
   
   
  
• The market may take us at our word with regard to our goal. This means in terms of facts: privatisation targets and the means and ways to put these into practice can be defined in the privatisation agreements we sign. We do, however, look to it that those contracts will also grant the freedom of movement we need to be able to work successfully in the sense of our overriding goal, i.e., for the benefit of all patients in the region while safeguarding the interests of our staff. We will not promise any seller or prospective employee any advantage or positive change without pointing to the sacrifices necessary to effect such change. We know from more than 20 successful take-overs that it is preferable to discuss the future and the challenges it may hold before the “marriage” instead of attempting to make each other believe that one can “cross the river without getting wet”. 
   
   
  
• When preparing (and preferably before concluding ) a take-over, we will review all units and medical specialties of the respective hospital in close co-operation with our partners on the sell-side in order to verify whether the hospital’s service range matches the demand in its catchment area. The next step is target setting and, in parallel, weighing the effects of the upcoming DRG-based reimbursement system against the targets we’ve defined. Where there are deviations of actual performance data – say, in the form of (additional) services that do not conform to the hospital’s mandate, insufficient capacity utilisation, shortcomings in quality or profitability – we’ll work out detailed concepts that sound out precisely what is needed to strengthen existing human and material resources, using the financing and purchasing power plus the hospital know-how of RHÖN-KLINIKUM Group. In doing so, our maxim is to achieve as much as possibly with the least possible social hardships for existing staff. In today’s markets, it’s common practice to pretend to be able to accomplish reorganisation without embarrassing change. This we cannot and will not promise - but we are prepared to shape the hospital’s future jointly with those affected by change.
   
   
  
• The same applies to our dealings with healthcare authorities. Where RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG finds that the “service reality” of a newly acquired hospital does not match demand, we will look for solutions within given legal and regulatory frameworks, and this will be done in a spirit of partnership and co-operation with the competent authorities. Should such joint effort fail to produce a viable solution, we will quite naturally make use of our freedom of movement – i.e., our independence as a private enterprise – to ensure that targets are met. Again, the overriding goal is patient satisfaction as being the basis for job security and profitability of the capital employed by us, in short, for ensuring the future of the company as a whole. 
   
  
  
• Public hospital owners who have entrusted us with their mandates have come to appreciate our strong regional orientation, as opposed to one-sided orientation towards anonymous group interests: what they find with us is identity of interests. This is exemplified, inter alia, by the fact that RHÖN-KLINIKUM Group has no centralised purchasing department or similar central functions, because we strongly believe that a hospital’s business is local and should therefore be managed with a view to local needs and conditions, notwithstanding modern benchmarking and management techniques. This is why we support decentralised structures and implement standardised practices only where necessary – say, for communication purposes or performance comparisons aimed at sharing experiences, skills and specialised knowledge across the Group. Of course, centralised uniformity may sometimes be quicker or even more efficient in the short run - but it would impair what is of enormous value to us in our daily work: growth in ideas, flexibility and customer orientation or, in our case, patient orientation. This is why we let our hospitals have their very own identity and will not even insist in the addition of “Rhön” to their names.
   
   

Find out more about RHÖN-KLINIKUM’s policies in the section "About us":

Corporate philosophy

Our mission