Friday, June 17, 2011

Believe what your customers do...not what they say!

To keep things simple, this blog has moved to the IMTJ web site. You can find the Health Tourism Blog here in future. Here's an extract of the latest blog post entitled: "Believe what your customers do...not what they say!"

A recent article in Harvard Business Review, “Four Simple Low Resolution Innovation Tests” highlights the problem faced by anyone who is considering investment in the medical tourism business. How can you know whether people will actually buy your service i.e. whether patients will actually travel abroad to use your services?

Much of the “research” conducted in the medical tourism sector is about what people say they will do.... not about what they actually do. For example, the 2009 Gallup Survey in the USA is frequently used to support the “booming medical tourism market” hypothesis.

The report on this Gallup poll was headed “Americans Consider Crossing Borders for Medical Care”. It found that “up to 29% of Americans would consider traveling abroad for medical procedures”.

Now the key words here are “will consider”. It does not say “will travel” or “have travelled”. And there lies the problem.......

.........Read the full article at IMTJ: Go to "Believe what your customers do...not what they say!"


Medical tourism: After the gold rush

To keep things simple, this blog has moved to the IMTJ web site. You can find the Health Tourism Blog here in future. Here's an extract of the latest blog post on "Medical tourism: After the gold rush"

Last year, I blogged about “Medical tourism...lessons from the California gold rush”. It’s taken me a while to write the postscript to this, but I finally got around to it last week when I spoke at the European Medical Travel Conference in Barcelona. (You can download my presentation “Medical Tourism: After the Goldrush” as a pdf file on the IMTJ web site).

In my gold rush analogy, I describe how in 2005/6, medical tourism became the next big thing.

In Google News for 2006, you’ll see headlines appearing like these:

  • “One million medical tourists flocking to India”
  • “Bumrungrad attracts more than 400,000 foreign patients each year”
  • “Philippines is set to cash in on the $3-trillion global medical tourism market”
  • “Half a million Britons travel for treatment....”

News stories appeared around the world about a surge in medical tourism. The first prospectors for “medical tourism gold” appeared - medical tourism agents and facilitators, overseas hospitals and clinics were seeking their fortune in the world of medical tourism. The tales of medical tourism gold began to multiply. Estimates of the number of medical tourists were in the hundreds of thousands, the millions, and then the tens of millions. Few medical tourism prospectors questioned the validity of these claims of the discovery of a rich vein of income or whether it was sustainable.......


.........Read the full article at IMTJ: Go to "Medical tourism: After the gold rush"

Comparing quality in medical tourism

To keep things simple, this blog has moved to the IMTJ web site. You can find the Health Tourism Blog here in future. Here's an extract of the latest blog post on Comparing quality in medical tourism.

How does a medical tourist make a valid comparison of a doctor, hospital or clinic in one country with a doctor, hospital or clinic in another? The simple answer is that he or she can’t. And the truth is that it may never be the case (well not in my lifetime).

In the hypothetical world, we talk about patients making informed choices about treatment....about how we can provide them with the information that they need to compare healthcare providers and make valid decisions about which one is the “best”, the “safest”, the “highest quality”. But even if someone is only interested in treatment within one country, this may be impossible. In a country such as the UK where there is a national publicly funded health system it becomes more of a possibility. In the UK, there are quality indicators, performance measures, and outcome data that are collected in the same way and analysed in the same way across all healthcare providers (whether they are public or private hospitals). So, patients can make reasonably valid comparisons of healthcare providers.

However, in many countries which are promoting themselves as medical tourism destinations, there may be no strategy or system for collecting data on quality, performance and outcomes on a national basis. So, making an “informed choice” even within that country becomes a virtual impossibility.

.........Read the full article at IMTJ: Go to Comparing quality in medical tourism.