Deloitte Study Challenges Medical Tourism's Basic Assumptions

Medical Outcomes and the Patient Healing Experience Trump Tourism

Given the anecdotal reports of a decreasing flow of medical travelers from the US to other countries, I sometimes wonder if our nascent industry has facilitated all the hips and knees that were primed and ready to go...and have now gone. I still get excited calls about the 60 Minutes segment featuring the hip surgery, waving palms of Chennai and boat drinks. Of course, these are now reruns from the original several years ago. The first movers in this industry now have about five years of experience...and patient outcomes data.

The well written Deloitte US Consumer Survey 2011 highlights what IndUShealth has observed for several years...that the travel piece of Medical Tourism is last on the list of priorities for the medical traveler. This is especially true for corporate programs.

The next generation of 'post 60 Minutes Medical Tourists' will be far more discriminating in their expectations for providers to prove a claimed level of quality. The Deloitte report also highlights the lack of confidence the healthcare consumer has for the traditional sources of healthcare quality data. This gives the next generation of facilitator the opportunity to use medical outcomes and patient satisfaction data for competitive advantage.

This is where the strategy of having scores of hospitals and physicians all over the planet to choose from breaks down. Nice physician bios that have been cut and paste from hospitals to facilitators..and then to other facilitators, is just not going to suffice. The consumers will be demanding outcomes data over a period of several years.

Is it more compelling to see two or three surgeons having great outcomes on thirty patients in two hospitals...or thirty surgeons doing two surgeries in 20 different hospitals? The market will certainly decide.

And the data that is provided for the consumer should be not just promotional from the hospital...to be believable, it should be representative of those patients the facilitator has actually managed.

These key metrics should provide enough data for a patient to abandon the painful familiarity of the US system, and embark on a healing journey that is in some cases on the far side of the world.

So what are some these key metrics?

1. Medical outcome followed over a period of at least a year
2. Post surgical infection rate
3. Patient satisfaction for the physician, hospital and facilitator
4. Cost

While it is now nearly impossible to get this information from a US hospital, savvy CEOs will begin to use the outcomes data from their star physicians to differentiate themselves in the market place. Documenting the positive patient experience will take on renewed importance, and in some markets, the only differentiating factor between an exceptional local hospital and a Bangalore super specialty hospital may only be the cost of the procedure.

Facilitators that hope to survive on internet generated patient referrals, with few care management capabilities, may soon face the same fate as travel agents did with the emergence of ubiquitous online aggregators like Expedia, and direct availability of tickets from Southwest and American.