Change in the medical tourism climate based on Keith Pollard

The article gives some insight on how medical tourism industry growth from a UK perspective and how it might have reached the maturity phase.  The article claims that many investors lost money amid the hype of the potential of the market which did not pan out and the protectionism. However, those that understood the market and were best equipped, informed and organized were successful.  Even with the changes in healthcare through ACA, the economic downturn, and rising costs for travel, it seems there is still the demand to provide affordable healthcare and thus payers and goverments are having to reconsider cross boundary options for healthcare.  The article states that this future model might be more regional rather than global.

http://www.imtj.com/articles/2011/blog-after-the-gold-rush-40165/
http://www.imtj.com/articles/2011/medical-tourism-trends/


In my opinion, we might be going from one growth curve, to another as in the diagram below:

Survey results from Journal of General Internal Medicine by Alleman, Luger et al.

This article agrees with the lower number of around 13,500 US travellers going abroad. This gives an approx. landscape of 45 medical tourist facilitators, each sending approximately 300 patients abroad. 65% of these facilitators were paid by the physicians, while the remaining received compensation from the foreign provider.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3077479/

Article on the shriking Medical Tourism market by Ian Youngman

More from a UK perspective, this article states that people will travel less for major surgeries and more for faster access. This is likely the case for european countries where the government sponsored health system creates wait lines as also seen in Canada.

http://www.imtj.com/articles/2011/the-medical-tourism-world-is-shrinking-30099/

Survey conducted on US based medical tourism facilitators by Christina Peters and Katherine Sauer

The authors described an increasing trend in the inquiry by US patients for medical services abroad. The actual number of trips taken was 13% of the inquiry. Results on the various factors for travel abroad for medical services is also shown.

http://www.na-businesspress.com/jmdc/sauerweb.pdf