Public and private leadership should see the shift in referral patterns of patients as a sign that we could do better; each one of us has an obligation to come together to do more to facilitate greater collaboration, partnership, and contribution to building up healthcare services worldwide. Long gone are the days of inbound patient referral from emerging markets without more two-way street dealing to justify these relationships. Insurance companies and providers must contribute to population health strategies not only from an ethical perspective for ethical reasons, but also to develop a sustainable business model moving forward.

Physician training, advisory and &and capacity building services, academic exchange, and philanthropic ventures focusing on population health management goals are be-coming the underlying requisite investment that a provider or health system must offer to continue to receive inbound patient referrals. This intersection across business units is often ignored, leaving global programs fragmented, difficult to expand, and otherwise unsustainable.

For example, there are leading hospitals in the United States collecting millions of dollars from a Caribbean government in physician training fees in areas of clinical expertise that the provider offers due to its own program capacity, yet a waiting period for a mammogram can be up to two years be-cause women’s health is not a top focus of the affiliation program. Not only does this fail to meet the needs identified in the nation-al healthcare assessment report, but it only results in inpatient referrals inbound to the United States.S. for services that could (and should) be delivered locally with the right advisory and training programs in place. The cost to the local government far outweighs the value received because complex and mi-nor clinical services must still be outsourced.

Memorandums of Understanding, hospital affiliations, and consulting agreements are executed between governments and providers to provide offer a variety of services not linked to inbound patient services sought, or even to the surgeries performed in other destinations as part of philanthropic ventures. Why is there such a disconnect? Generally, the internal departments responsible for these various business development activities are not talking to each other. The result is a complete lack of continuity and lost opportunity to really generate an impact in the markets entered.

Many health systems have been working with governments for years without a defined strategy for global health and, as a result, the global health program lacks leadership sup-port. Philanthropic programs generate funding for research and development; advisory contracts and inbound patient flow generates revenue, but rarely do all of these activities link to one regional purpose and global health statement.

Moreover, physicians more often than not maintain their own relationships with refer-ring physicians and global connections and fail to pull these relationships into the global health department, leaving systems with-out good data about the source of referrals. Worse yet, the international program loses revenue- generating on opportunities. Physician training programs, residencies, observer-ships, and other physician- and nursing-based programs are not organized in a way to leverage visiting or trained medical professionals as brand ambassadors for future referrals. This represents a significant disconnect and lack of efficiency.

Other critical areas involved in the business of health are being neglected. Price transparency and sensitivity, superb clinical out-comes, and low complications rates, as well as a high priority focus on end to end care continuum for optimal patient experiences, are the now the norm. A new door is open, affording smaller or less well-known brands the opportunity to step in and acquire business relationships from embassies, insurance companies, and corporate referrers, defying years of historical patient referral patterns.

Trending new industry goals

One of the biggest areas in need of innovation is in the delivery of the patient experience. Too often, patients are just an identification number, a medical record, or a claims number on an insurance form.

This does not refer to the delivered care by nurses or physicians per se; in failing to prioritize the transformation of the business of health, we often forget the human side of it.

We forget empathy. We forget that empathy and the attention to the details in the patient care continuum is good business. The single most valuable change in the medical tourism industry has been the ‘silent pause’ taken by stakeholders all over the world to accept that riding big brands and prior patient experience alone is not enough to sustain long term business models and justify the major investment by itself. New models of healthcare delivery urgently provide not only better quality and delivery of healthcare services, but also the better value of services built upon bundled pricing and a patient experience that all con-tribute to lower complications.

More employers, insurance companies, and governments direct contract with hospitals and steer patients across state borders and (in some cases) across country borders. Why? Let’s suppose perhaps they have woken out of a dream previously focused on cost reduction strategies, only to find that the best cost reduction strategies are based in high quality, reduced complications, and more affordable care . Providing covered patients with the right diagnosis and right treatment plan the first time around is the best care. This dream also rests upon the need to treat individuals as human beings, with the element of choice a necessity and decisions resting upon true transparency of quality and pricing. Steering individuals to centers of excellence for the right diagnosis the first time around supports putting the individual first above all else.

It’s crucial to ensure patients’ needs are met, especially those who travel for medical care. Each year we receive patients from all 50 states and more than 125 countries. We chose Global Healthcare Accreditation as it conducts a deep review of the entire Medical Travel Care Continuum, beginning when the patient first enquires about our services all the way through their arrival back home, including the patient experience at all touch points. Addition-ally, GHA reviews those sustainable business processes and practices related to medical travel that has helped us identify areas of opportunity to enhance patient experience and improve operational performance.”

There is a huge disparity in healthcare delivery worldwide. But medical travel supports breaking down this disparity through clarity and universally delivered expectations. Organizations like Global Healthcare Accreditation are focused on systematizing these expectations and building standards to hold organizations and people responsible.

Accreditation for hospitals in medical travel is truly disruptive in a world of consumers requiring more personalized service and clinical excellence.

The patient experience is just as important to medical travel because it’s inextricably linked to better clinical outcomes.

Healthcare is more personalized than ever and the hospitals that are winning over the patients and referrers of care, are those that ‘get it’ and give it. It’s about the individualized story for each patient, the healthcare experience, and the personalized relation-ship between patients and their healthcare providers.

Expanding the metrics

Healthcare is one of the late industries to globalize. We can see various important trends impacting the patient who travels for care, whether they are patients from developed countries seeking more affordable care in developing countries due to lack of insurance (or being underinsured), or patients in developing markets seeking access to better quality or avoiding long queues.

Celebrating twelve years since its inception, Medical Tourism Association provided the industry opportunity to reflect on some other great changes, as evidenced through the dialogues shared by leading buyers and providers of care at the live and virtual events of-fered by HEALTHCARE ЯREVOLUTION and the World Medical Tourism & Global Health-care Congress (WMTC) each year.

We are experiencing an expansion of the definition of the terminology, the scope of the industry, and the adoption of good met-rics in measuring the true economic impact of worldwide access to health and wellness services, truly transforming the business of health. Many of the earlier professional dia-logues involved heated debates about us-ing the term ‘medical tourism’ based upon an unwillingness to connect serious medical care with tourism.

How likely was it that someone receiving a knee replacement would be found zip lining in Costa Rica? That all depends on your definition of ‘tourism’. Whether a medical travel program is even needed is also a big topic of debate, primarily by stakeholders resisting investment in technology and tools used to improve and measure or improve efficiency and effectiveness of healthcare de-livery. There has been a ‘wild west’ approach to maintaining status quo and avoiding accountability. In fact, the European Parliament released a Policy Report defining medical tourism as a subset of health tourism and spa related wellness. They are interrelated and interconnected without a doubt. Yet the impact on tourism is prominent for a medical traveler with extended stays and daily in-destination spending.

These days, much funding for medical travel programs emanates from tourism dollars al-located in the public sector. We now see that the economic impact in tourism as a result of patient mobility as one of the best measurements to utilize in determining investment from a policy perspective.

First, we can recognize the important link be-tween various public sectors in health, hospitality, tourism, and economic development. Second, we can drive economic impact from one sector into the other for investment to create greater impact and fund programs that previously were not viable. Global Healthcare Resources developed a Medical Travel Calculator for planners and stake-holders to look at their health and tourism services and estimate total economic impact through job creation, taxes, and delivery of health and hospitality services.

Accountability is key

Increasingly payers such as insurers, employers and governments are using criteria that impact medical travelers and international patients in order to determine which hospitals will be included in their global medical networks. Factors such as quick access to treatments, international office efficiency, medical center dedication to international patients and servicing their medical needs, cultural competency and ability to coordinate logistical support are becoming nearly important as the quality of the medical outcomes when choosing where to send patients.Healthcare providers who neglect these areas will find themselves gradually relegated to the sidelines by payers seeking to provide a high-quality patient experience as well as a positive medical outcome.

While accrediting bodies such as Accreditation Canada and Joint Commission Inter-national have assisted medical travel destination sites to achieve a standard of care comparable to that found in accredited hospitals within those countries, the scope of the standards does not encompass all of the significant dimensions required for medical travel.

Competencies such as cultural sensibility, financial transactions, marketing and tour-ism, and travel, for example, directly impact medical travelers and must be addressed in order ensure the delivery of high-quality patient experience at each touchpoint along the care continuum. More national accreditation bodies such as National Accreditation Board for Hospitals & Health Care Providers (NABH) in India, the Malaysian Society for Quality in Health, the Korean Health Industry Development Institute, and others are taking strides to engage their stakeholders in medical travel accreditation and certification as valued-added investment in their health sec-tors.According to Karen Timmons, CEO of GHA, “Working with Global Healthcare Accreditation provides a unique opportunity to con-duct a deep dive into global/international patient service units and an opportunity to have an impact on improving the quality, safety and experience for all patients who travel for care. Additionally, because GHA focuses on the entire continuum, those business practices within an organization that impact the medical travel program, such as Marketing, Finance, and IT are included. Many leaders of organizations have shared that this component is very important to them, and GHA strives to ensure a GHA accredited organization receives solutions that impact not just patient outcomes, but business performance as well.”

Dr. Erik Fleischman, former international medical director of Bumrungrad International Hospital (BIH) stated, “BIH has been a leader in International Medical care outside the USA for over twenty years. We were the first hospital in Asia to receive Joint Com-mission International Certification (JCI) in 2002 and now we are also the first hospital to receive Global Healthcare Accreditation (GHA) in Asia. These important accreditations help us to become a quality and clinical excellence leader in the international medical care realm and show our equivalence in quality care with any great Western medical care system. GHA was particularly fitting for our institution as it is the only accreditation that helps assure quality care from the time a patient leaves their home to the time they return after medical care. We are a great hospital. We are even better after GHA.”

Public and private engagement

Good cooperation between the private and public sector in positioning a destination as a desirable medical tourism destination is extremely important. Proponents of public-private partnerships see that sustainability relies upon having a public policy and private engagement. Great partnerships between the public and private sector, like what we’ve seen in the United Arab Emirates, Thailand, Malaysia, Jordan, and South Korea, are seeing tremendous growth. such as in the Unit-ed Arab Emirates, Thailand, Malaysia, Jordan, and South Korea, for example.

In Global Healthcare Resources’ Global Buyers Report, safety and security was a No. 1 concern and & decisive factor on in influencing where buyers of healthcare refer their patients for care. Nations and organizations not addressing these concerns will fall short of success without addressing it with prospective patients. For a nation or city with safety issues promoting itself in medical tourism, it is essential to take an honest public opinion assessment on what is being done to assure the safety of visitors. There are real threats to security, such likeas terrorism and crime,, crime, etc. as well as other and then potential risks like mosquito-borne vi-ruses. All of this should be addressed transparently; the discussion should be held right from the onset to assure confidence that visitor safety is a top priority.

The International Healthcare Research Center and Global Healthcare Resources partnered to launch the Medical Tourism Index (MTI), which is now a peer- reviewed, academically validated tool thato measures the perception of a destination for medical tourism. While the MTI has just begun to explore its application in destination development strategic planning, IHRC plans to release the MTI every two years, expanding the consumer survey pool to new targeted groups (such as Chinese, Middle Easterners, Russians, etc) and CIS nations for comparison. Currently, MTI highlights the top 41 destinations for medical travel from the perspective of Americans. Since then, several regional surveys have developed, including an Arabic and & MENA survey, to confirm the MTI destinations were valid from the perspective of other continents.

From a government perspective, well-organized Framed properly, medical travel from a government perspective has the capacity to fund population health management and national health equity programs that are currently underfunded and underutilized. Global partners can serve as instigators of population health change and inspiration towards advancing global healthcare concerns such like as obesity, diabetes, and other lifestyle diseases. Additionally, advancements in prevention and personalized medicine through genomics should become the norm while curative care becomes more advanced. through the same science.

We have not yet measured the long- term impact of medical travel programs on improving access to improved quality of care and improving population health. This is our next decade of work. If medical travel pro-grams inbound can truly raise the standard of healthcare for local populations, every nation should be looking at the policy to develop and facilitate it.

Tools and technology

Technology and tools that provide greater access to care and enhance the patient experience are now the requisite, yet they’re still not the norm. Increasingly, traveling patients are becoming more informed and demanding more data in making decisions about their care. Current estimates for medical travel place the size of the industry at approximately USD $100 billion US dollars and growing, yet uniform definitions and data regarding the exact number of patients who travel, and their outcomes of care, (including both clinical and patient satisfaction), do not exist.

In the 2019 Medical Tourism Pulse Survey, almost Nearly 40 percent% of the medical travel professionals say they lack the technology necessary to grow their business or organization, and 43 percent% believe adequate medical record transfer is not available to protect the privacy of the patient, according to the Medical Tourism Pulse Survey. In an age of developing cures for cancer, how is it possible that we are unable to protect patient privacy or find a transfer solution for a universally accepted medical record?

Even worse, there is no consensus on how to define a medical traveler. Should a medical traveler be defined as only a patient who travels outside his/her country for care? Or should we also include tourists who get sick or injured and require medical care? What about foreign residents, employees, and expatriates? We cannot even begin to answer these questions or gather accurate data without agreement on this basic point. When some nations use the term ‘international patients’ and others ‘medical tourists,’, the dis-parity of information generates a lack of trust in the underlying data and then an ongoing lack of investment.

Accessing the patients

While cash-paying patients may be secured through search engine optimization and marketing, it is it hugely unreliable from an investment perspective as the primary source of referral; each new competitor comes into the market with similar marketing and tapping the same target markets. About 86 percent% of the professionals surveyed in the Medical Tourism Pulse Survey believe the information on their website is important when comparing healthcare providers, but only 51 percent% of companies receive their inquiries direct from consumers.

Business to business (B2B) and business to government (B2G) potential provides for direct contracting opportunities to grow the medical travel business and really advance healthcare worldwide through the strategic partnerships, affiliations, and capacity building joint ventures that are developing.

The Medical Tourism Association saw an opportunity to position itself as the voice of the medical tourism industry, with a primary goal to grow awareness of the business to business opportunities in medical travel. Its focus has been on building an immense buyer net-work to connect businesses together to grow opportunities, becoming MTA’s most successful niche as which no other company does this on a remotely similar scale.

The B2B space includes an employer or insurer who is incentivizing an plan member to travel to a Center of Excellence or an organization that they have contracted with for value-based purchasing. This may be domestic (within cities in a country), regional (like within the European Union for example), or international.
The needs of the traveling patient are immense and yet not enough attention is spent assuring that care continuum is safe and secure and leveraging that experience as a means of generating more patient volume. After all, the patient is our highest priority and humanity needs a far greater motivation to combine the art, the science and the business of health.

Become a “healthcare revolutionary”

After years of bringing innovation and disruption in healthcare, wellness, medical travel, benefits, and insurance, a lot of things have come full circle to reframe our thinking. We are innovating by convening the change agents from all over the world. ‘Healthcare revolutionaries’ are people committed to innovation, disrupting the space and the status quo.
Our world is not operating at its full potential because human beings are not operating at theirs.
We’re currently in the middle of a silent cultural revolution. It’s a revolution we’re only just beginning to recognize, affecting every single living person. This revolution is transforming our society to everyone’s benefit. It’s a call to every woman and man to rise to a new definition of leadership and create change in the world regarding health. Humanity needs far greater motivations that transcend our limited, precious time on earth – a call toh to truly contribute our best while we are here.
How do we do this as part of a digital health transformation? The global healthcare industry is rapidly advancing into new areas of technology, innovation, and disruption of medical travel. Yet, the one consistent theme throughout is the need to deliver top patient experience, offer price-sensitive and value-based specialized care, and the need for collaborative, consensus-based industry growth that involves public policy and private sector engagement.
In the meantime, you can be an agent of change in the medical tourism industry. You can be a healthcare revolutionary.

Renée-Marie Stephano

What has changed ?
⇒ Previously, Thiqa cardholders were covered 100% at private healthcare facilities in Abu Dhabi. Now they are covered at 80%.

⇒ Thiqa cardholders were covered at 90% for care sought outside of Abu Dhabi, they are now covered at 50%. However if the treatment is not available in Abu Dhabi then it will be covered at 100%.

⇒ While it remains unchanged in public hospitals, in private facilities in-vitro fertilization treatments have been reduced to one per year, down two from the previous years.

⇒ Expats, ages 40 and up, that are covered under the Abu Dhabi Basic Plan may be subject to pay 50% of their policy’s premium. If their employer decides to implement this, co-payment and percentage are optional.

⇒ The change to the Abu Dhabi Basic Plan also means that workers will have to pay 50% of the policies premium for their wives and up to three children, a fourth child and parents will not be covered.

Initially, some citizens of Abu Dhabi may only view the downside to these changes, but the overall goal is to create a more viable and healthy healthcare sector. Haad is working towards a more sustainable healthcare sector by encouraging competition and further improving the quality and breadth of the healthcare offering. Implementing these changes is an important new step towards fulfilling our vision for a ‘healthier Abu Dhabi’. These measures will further contribute to our ongoing efforts to increase efficiency, standardize operations and increase the sector’s financial viability – for the benefit of the patient, and the healthcare system as a whole,” said Adeeb Al Zaabi, manager of corporate communication department at Haad.
The changes enacted will not only increase patient retention, but will also help to support investors who want to build health services in Abu Dhabi strengthening the sector. This will likely result in less out bound patients and potentially more inbound.

Seek for support. Because while making payments in large amounts with patients from various countries and time zones, the number and repitition of payment related inquiries and requests rise. Most hospitals aren’t organized to deal with these inquiries all day long. They likewise would prefer not to deal with this.

Payment comfort. Patients will search for more helpful, efficient, and convenient ways for making payments which drive these exchanges to web means because of the capacity to transfer funds fast and securely and can be controlled by means of sms or email.

Common or local payment alternatives. Offering international patients familiar payment choices in their currency by using web experience can be serious differentiator in their experiences. The options which offer discounted rates compared to those offered by banks in the patients’ country will probably be more pleasing.

Agreement and reliability. In the condition of increasing terrorism threat and focusing on financing sources, transparency and compliance will be  the most important sides. Hospitals will be required fast confirmation of sources, providing detailed transaction reports for all payments.

Despite the payment is the last part to think in the medical tourism field, these above mentioned aspects become significant and necessary for both the payers and the payees as medical travel becomes more common day by day.

Since healthcare organizations aim to attract more international patients, they need to eliminate such payment problems by providing them with a stress-free and localized method of payment that they can easily settle in back office.

Shahsuvar Hajizada

Director 

Rhazes Global