Choosing Your Medical Tour Operator – Your Crucial Considerations

A recent study revealed that while USA leads the league of industrial nations with higher health care costs still patients don’t get privileged services matching up to dollar value they pay. Americans shell out the highest bills for physician visits, hospital treatments, surgical procedures and get expensive diagnostic tests like MRIs at a higher than average rate. Today a significant percentage of Americans are obese, diabetic, suffering from cardiac arrest and many require spine, neuro and other orthopedic surgeries. Furthermore approximately 50 million people lack health insurance plan making them vulnerable to eroding their savings on a fairly pricey yet unavoidable medical procedures. In short, this inadequacy of health care industry has fostered a growing trend of consumer availing low cost medical tourism services from several countries of Asia, Latin America and Europe.

For instance some Asian hospitals, under popular medical tourism packages have put forward cosmetic surgery coupled with vacation trip to India or Thailand. Since cosmetic surgery is not covered under most insurance plans, individuals were too enticed to fly Asia for the procedure to avoid high out-of-pocket expenses. Slowly but surely expanding the pack of credible medical tourism agencies and inclusion of more complex process like coronary artery bypass surgery, mitral valve replacement, joint replacement, and herniated disc surgery, this industry is thriving in leaps and bound. Also offshore medical institutions also provides services to simplify the workflow process by transferring medical records for patients across the Pacific, making air and hotel reservations, and hosting patients when they arrive at the destination airport with the help of certified medical tour agent. What’s more they have started to address the concerns of patients by taking care their safety and liability. A few hundred hospitals of once so called third world county have now passed the stringent standard set by JCI – Joint Commission International (JCI), an arm of JCAHO.

Medical tourism companies are spreading their wings across the whole world in addition to their particularly high quality services, which is a fact. But what matters most is this being a non standardized industry having a self regulation in place; it’s difficult to select a perfect medical tour company that suits your need. So while shopping for your medical tour operator you must address the following crucial factors.

1. Certification or Recognition by a Serious Medical Tourism Organization: Well this makes sense. You are not only trying to figure the best medical tourism package but also you need high quality health care.

2. Strong Relationships with JCI Accredited Hospitals: Second and most important factor that gives you peace of mind is JCI recognition. Ask your metical tour operator whether their suggested hospital is one approved by JCI. If not, move on to the new medical tour agency.

3. Pre and Post Procedure Care: Post surgical trauma care has a crucial role in healing. Also getting tale health and tale medicine also makes a lot of sense to ascertain crucial details of the patient's illness, like various symptoms, speed of recovery etc. Care should include pre-operative videoconferencing together with the healthcare team and the required specialist from the respective hospital. Most medical tourism companies are quite diplomatic answering your queries so start marking the red flags before you are sold to them.

4. Travel & Vacation Assistance: Medical tourism, apart from less expensive prices for excellent services, has progressed in the level of popularity also due to the opportunity to travel. Hence, it would be really advisable to look for a medical tourism company that provides voyage and vacation aid. This includes, but is not limited to, assistance with visa and travel documents, complete travel information package, airport support arrival/departure, local and international airline bookings etc.

5. Management Team with Medical Background: It is an indisputable fact that since medical tourism companies are in the field of medicine their staff needs to have good enough medical background. Actually, they need to have excellent educational background coupled with empathy to suggest best medical tour for you.

Well it’s a beginning of new era when medical tourism companies are going to end the disparity of high cost and cumbersome health care. The crux of the whole discussion is getting the affordable health care is your basic right and do take time to understand medical tourism services before you proceed for homeland medical procedures.