Journey opens doors in Far East

Good thing Moody, a protege of former HCA boss Jack Bovender, is hard to ruffle. He keeps his eye on the corporate prize, forging new business contacts around the globe who may one day help his tele-medicine company set up satellite offices or win contracts in Asia, South America, the Middle East and maybe Africa.

Moody's young innovation company, Dream Systems, established a three-person office in London 14 months ago afterwards a Bovender-led trade mission to Europe introduced Moody to Touchdown London - a business development program that offers small companies help establishing a low-cost office there.

The British excursion sold Moody on the idea of fact-finding trips to foreign lands as a way to learn about the risks and potential rewards in new markets. So, he leaped at the chance to go to China and South Korea before this month on a state-sponsored trip to a part of the world hungry for Western health-care research.

Moody says China, in particular, has a blossoming interest in using research to solve its health-care problems. There, health care is a thorny numbers game as tens of millions of workers flood into cities from rural areas for new jobs. China doesn't have enough doctors and hospitals to provide for them.

Dream Systems' brain trust figures that connecting doctors with far-distant patients, or hospitals with remote doctors via tele-medicine and cloud computing, are part of the answer.

The risks of doing business in China -

The risks of doing business in China - and protecting precious intellectual property from copycats there - argue in favor of going slow.

Still, Moody said he returned from overseas last week with a handful of solid business contacts to be nurtured in the coming months, including two or three in Beijing and another couple of relationships in Seoul.

"As new hospitals are built, they need the expertise to manage those hospitals. And research is very much a part of that," Moody said, acknowledging it may take a during longer previously that pays off with revenue from business deals in China or South Korea for his company.