Middlemen take uncertainty out of medical tourism

While medical travel is thousands of years old, contemporary American medical tourism is in its infancy. The rise of the "health travel planner," or "medical travel concierge," will indeed help ease the decision-making pain of prospective health travelers, connect them with the best hospitals and physicians, and assist with all-important aftercare. Our forthcoming consumer guidebook, "Patients Beyond Borders: Everybody's Guide to Affordable, World-Class Medical Tourism," informs patients how to screen for the best planners, and establish successful working relationships with these newcomers to the health service sector. As the medical travel industry matures, accreditation and licensing of health travel planners will follow. Meanwhile, patients considering medical travel should do due diligence, and check references (former patients, healthcare providers, et al).

Thank you for intelligently including "this is one time when patients would be wise to consult with an outside expert rather than trying to go it alone" in your article.

Health risks take on a new meaning when one travels outside the US for healthcare. For one thing foreign healthcare systems haven’t had the “benefits” of medical malpractice. In US hospitals, medical and dental practices, we have thousands of policies, procedures and standards of care to reduce the risk of medical errors. Many of these medical errors were discovered and hence corrected – because someone sued. While the design and application of these policies, procedures and standards of care are applied by any medical professional with integrity their application and then measuring their effectiveness has added greatly to our healthcare costs here.

Yet, we now have an opportunity to make further use of these very same policies, procedures and standards of care by requiring that foreign hospitals who solicit US healthcare consumers use what we have learned. Additionally we need to require that the middlemen of “medical tourism” who say they are the experts, be measured in terms of their competency to recognize a truly safe foreign healthcare practice based on a working knowledge of the wealth of information we have here in the US.

Not doing this poises foreign hospitals and the traveling patients who are going there at risk of repeating the past.

Stephanie Sulger RN, MS
Health and Safety Specialist
Medical Tours International