After reading Patients Beyond Borders by Josef Woodman I was even more curious about medical travel/tourism and thought I should find out more about it.

My first experience with this ‘industry’ was in 1991 while I was living in San Diego, CA. Two female colleagues at the office went to Tijuana, Mexico. One woman went for a rhinoplasty and the other for breast augmentation; it being much cheaper for these surgeries over the border than in the US. At the time it wasn’t called medical tourism, in fact, a few of my colleagues called it crazy, if I’m not mistaken.

A lot has changed since then and an entire industry has emerged, from Mexico and Costa Rica to India, Singapore, Thailand and Hungary. Just a quick google search for medical tourism brings up 1.7 million results.

As you know when an industry develops enough to be recognized as a viable business opportunity, entrepreneurs, marketers and researchers try to estimate the size of the prize and the reasons behind consumer interest. McKinsey recently published an article, as well as Deloitte, another consultancy, making predictions about the medical travel market. But their calculations on the size of the market were remarkably different.

So I decided to ask Josef Woodman for his opinion. He spent over 3 years researching his book and I thought he’d be a good a resource.

Woodman’s response to my question about why the market size numbers differed was as follows:

“First, the McKinsey report is spectacularly flawed, a view you will find shared by nearly everyone, pro or con, in the medical travel and global healthcare community. In brief, the report so drastically limited the definition of medical traveler as to render it nearly meaningless. According to author Paul Mango, who delivered the report’s findings earlier this year at a medical travel conference in Las Vegas, McKinsey excluded “contiguous border travel,” such as cross-border travel from US to Mexico (some 40,000 medical travelers annually), Indonesia to Singapore (some 100,000), Indonesia to Malaysia (+/-60,000), Cambodia & Laos to Bangkok, et al. McKinsey also excluded all cosmetic surgery, including bariatrics.”

“Inversely, the Deloitte Touche study, released less than a week later, cited 700,000+ healthcare consumers from the US alone crossing borders for medical treatment. This number is wildly high. A simple calculation, applying the number of total international beds available to medical travelers in a given year, will reveal the gross inaccuracies of these data.”

The industry will continue to grow as medical travel companies try to woo a certain type of consumer. These consumers are people willing to take the risk of going overseas for medical procedures, while at the same time take full advantage of the cost savings. Until employers and insurance companies get more involved in this business and offer it as part of the employee benefits package, it will remain a small but growing business opportunity.

You might think this is far off into the future but there are some significant stirrings happening right now. One example is from an unnamed company North Carolina paying for an employee to travel to India’s Wockhart Hospital for hip-replacement surgery. Another example from The Economist explains how Hannaford’s, a New England grocery store chain, is picking up the entire tab (surgery, accommodation, transportation) for an employee’s medical travel to Singapore.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 8:00 am and is filed under Medical Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.