Wednesday, April 18, 2007

New association formed for medical tourism

At the recent World Health Tourism Congress in Cyprus, the launch of the International Medical Travel Association (IMTA) was announced.

The IMTA seeks to represent the interests of medical travellers and the medical travel industry including healthcare providers and medical travel facilitators. The association currently has 26 registered members from across the world. Dr Steven Tucker, Medical Director of the West Clinic Excellence Cancer Centre in Singapor, is the President of the IMTA.

How successful the organisation will be in developing internationally accepted standards and codes of conduct for medical tourism.....who knows?

The medical tourism market is very fragmented consisting of many minor players such as doctors, dentists and individual clinics and various medical tourism "facilitators"and hospital groups. As yet, no one company has attempted to take a really significant share of the market. It's likely that those who take the lead in this fast emerging market will be the standard setters which others will follow.

4 comments:

Subarna said...

It's good to see the IMTA taking the first step towards representing the interests of those associated with the medical tourism industry. Definitely, the sub-sections of this industry need to take the initiative of making this move a success.

jeffbot said...

Hi Keith,

We may have met on Cyprus; we're were both there at the same time at the same event, at any rate.

I'd like to correspond a bit but am not finding an email address. If you'd like, you can contact me at the page for my book,

www.beautyfromafar.com

and then delete this post if you find it too self-serving. ;-)

-jeff

Jonathan Edelheit said...

The Medical Tourism Association has officially launched. www.MedicalTravelAuthority.Com and is made up of all the top International Hospitals and leaders in Medical Tourism.

Jonathan Edelheit
President
Medical Tourism Association
info@MedicalTravelAuthority.Com

Anonymous said...

It will be exciting to watch the developments of IMTA. The medical tourism industry and medical tourists may benefit from it.