Monthly Archives: October 2009

Medical Tourism | Follow up care

One of the questions that frequently comes up when considering getting care outside of your home country is “how do I get follow up care and who pays for it”?
Here are some tips:
1. Whenever possible, be sure to establish a relationship with a care provider in your home country BEFORE you leave and discuss your plan to get care.
2. Introduce your primary provider at home to your provider overseas
3. Be sure you have adequate information to give your primary provider so he or she knows what kind of procedure you had done.
4. Check with your insurance company and your overseas provider to determine the limits of postoperative care
5. Consider buying a postoperative care/complications insurance policy
6. Discuss with a local surgeon whether and under what conditions they will see you if you have a complication from surgery done outside your home country.

As with most procedures, there are risks. Fortunately, most procedures go smoothly without complications. Should they occur, however, it’s best to have a plan in place before you have a procedure.

Arlen Meyers, MD, MBA

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Is it safe?

In the 1976 thriller, “Marathon Man”, a sadistic ex-Nazi dentist(Laurence Olivier)  tortures an unknowing grad student ( Dustin Hoffman) to determine the whereabouts of stolen jewels, constanting asking “Is it safe?”.  The line was etched into the annals of celluloid history. It is now reappearing as more and more potential patients are asking whether it is safe to get care away from home.  A few things to remember:

1. Healthcare, whether delivered in the US or somewhere else, is never completely safe. The operating room, a hospital bed or even an outpatient clinic is potentially dangerous under the best of circumstances.

2. In general, the more times a surgeon and the facility where he or she works does a procedure, the better the outcome.

3. While education, credentials, experience and certification are important quality benchmarks, they sometimes do not tell the whole story.

4. Whether in the US or around the world, quality outcomes data are often incomplete or non-existent.

Patients choose doctors for many reasons. A rational decision based on quality data is rarely one of them.


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Healthcare reform and medical tourism

Will reforms to the US healthcare “system” impact medical tourism? Of course, no one can predict the future. Potential patients choose medical tourism for 5 reasons (http://www.imtjonline.com/articles/2008/medical-tourism-vs-traditional-international-medical-travel-a-tale-of-two-models/): cost, accessablity, availability, travel and confidentiality.

Perhaps the most likely thing to change as a result of reform efforts would be cost, although that is uncertain. Even if reform bends the curve, however, certain procedures will not be covered, like cosmetic surgery, and copays and deductables are likely to increase. The increase in patients seeking care for obesity , for example, drives patients to look for cheaper alternatives for care as well as other elective procedures. A sudden influx of over 30 million people into the system will tax the supply side of the equation and will take almost a generation to correct. Technologies, like stem cell treatments, are subject to political forces and regulatory pressure unlikely to change in the near future. Medical tourists, by definition, are not adverse to travel for care, sometimes combining it with a vacation or recuperation. Finally, there are people who just don’t want others at home to know they had “something done”.

Bottom line: As Niels Bohr noted, prediction is very difficult, especially about the future. The terms in this equation, however, reform outcomes seem to favor the growth of medical tourism.


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