Health tourism provider

A Health tourism provider or medical tourism provider is an organisation or a company which seeks to bring together a prospective patient with a service provider, usually a hospital or a clinic and markets itself as such. If the patient is crossing international borders to obtain medical care, then that individual would usually be known as a "medical tourist" and hence these groups are generally facilitators and developers of medical tourism, which brings into play a number of issues that do not apply when a patient stays within their own country of origin.

Some such organisations and companies specialise in certain areas of healthcare, such as cosmetic surgery, dentistry or transplant surgery, while others are more generalised in their approach, providing multiple services over a wide range of medical specialities.

There is potentially an issue of public safety in this field and potential clients have to balance cost against personal safety.

Some health tourism providers make information available about the hospitals and the doctors that they are partnered with, but the nature, extent and quality of the information provided by different organizations and companies working in this field can vary enormously, and may not provide useful independently-verifiable information to prospective clients regarding, for example, the safety and ethical standards of overseas hospitals that they are working with and the adequacy of the credentials of surgeons they are using.

Ideally, given the importance of healthcare, clear information regarding the quality of hospitals being used should be made available, such as whether they have been subjected or not to independent international healthcare accreditation practice evidence-based medicine and good governance, and that process should include independent credentialing of healthcare staff, including and especially the doctors providing the services, as well as evidence that those doctors are maintaining and improving their personal professional standards.

In addition, there are a number of non-medical angles which receive varying degrees of attention in the web sites operated by various providers. These are numerous, and include

-	prices and how to pay

-	hotels

-	non-medical risks involved

-	language issues

-	availability of techniques (e.g. new operations, new approaches to infertility, new imaging techniques)

-	pre-travel health issues, such as antimalarial therapy (e.g. for Thailand) and relevant immunisations (e.g. typhoid and hepatitis A are recommended for travelling to Turkey or the Philippines)

-      ethics (for example, see Organ harvesting in China)

-	medico-legal issues (e.g. are the doctors providing the treatment adequately indemnified or carrying personal malpractice insurance ?, is the hospital itself adequately insured? can a patient sue if things go wrong ? will the hospital repatriate the body of a patient who dies on the operating table ?)

This last point is very important. In 2006 the group CEO of Bumrungrad Hospital in Thailand, stated "If there's a mistake, we fix it..... But the idea of suing for multimillions of dollars for damages is not going to be something you can do outside the U.S." (in fact, this particular hospital require all doctors within their group to carry malpractice insurance). However, Americans and Europeans going overseas as medical tourists may not be comfortable with the fact that they may not be able to take effective legal action if they are dissatisfied with their experience. 

The Medical Protection Society, a British group, is responsible for indemnifying doctors in many countries, including Singapore, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Brunei, which increases the level of protection enjoyed both by patients locally as well as those coming in as medical tourists.

Examples of practice in this field
Many of the companies most active in this emerging field are from the UK and the USA. An authority at the Harvard Business School recently stated that "medical tourism is promoted much more heavily in the United Kingdom than in the United States". The following list of health tourism providers is not exhaustive.

Linda Briggs Ltd


A British group. The web site has a "Research Section", which includes a section on "Doctors and surgeons professional organisations", which provides some useful information about individual practitioners within the various countries used. However, there is no data to assist with assessing if individual hospitals are of adequate quality, and no discussion of international healthcare accreditation, whether UK-sourced or from elsewhere.

Surgery Worldwide


A British Group. The web site contains a list of testimonials from customers, but contains no independently verifiable information about hospitals used or medical staff used. For example, there is no mention about the measurement of hospital standards, of hospital accreditation by any of the hospitals they are using, or of professional organisations responsible for credentialing individual doctors.

BD Healthcare


This British group are very strict about the standards they apply to the partner hospitals they work with. As a minimum they insist that partner hospitals hold accreditation with recognised international healthcare accreditation providers based in the United Kingdom, the USA, Australia or Canada, and they also require that “healthcare providers fully check out their recruitment and background checking processes” and that “staff are adequately experienced and qualified (a qualification on its own is not enough evidence to make a judgement on competence)”.

Med Retreat


An American group which describes itself as “the leading, American owned and operated, medical tourism service agency facilitating the healthcare needs of North American health tourism patients seeking all forms of medical travel programs”. The web site has a section on the Joint Commission, an American private group accrediting hospitals outside of the USA (in its JCI form), but the web site has no information about other forms of international healthcare accreditation, whether they consider them to be reputable or not, or about the independent and verifiable credentialing of medical specialists. The web site lists a number of partner hospitals it works with which have not to date been subjected to any sort of independent external accreditation process from overseas, such as in India and Malaysia.

The future
At the present time, while hospitals providing medical tourism services may (or may not) be subject to international healthcare accreditation by a reputable independent international group, there is currently no organisation responsible for accrediting the Health Tourism Provider Companies themselves and ensuring that the standards that they and their staff are operating to are safe and ethical. American accreditation groups include the Joint Commission and British groups include the Trent Accreditation Scheme.

It would be unwise for a British, American, Australian, German, French, Canadian, or Swedish person travelling overseas for reasons of medical tourism to simply trust testimonials or statements about personal quality provided by provider hospitals that they read on web sites without looking further. The patient pages at the SOFIHA web site may be of value in this respect. The Medical Tourism Association and the International Medical Travel Association  may also provide useful information in this area for prospective patients.