Archive for April, 2007
Monday, April 30th, 2007
Medical Call Centers: your new best friends
Medical call center is perhaps one of the most interesting niches in the call center business as it only represents 3% of the total activities of call centers in Europe and in the US (acc. Euromonitor) yet it is expanding at a very high rate.
The underlying question is dual: is customer satisfaction high with medical […]
4 Comments » - Posted in preventive care, Medical follow up by raphael encaoua
Sunday, April 29th, 2007
The European Union tries to regulate medical tourism
The European Union is now taking a close look to the evolution of the medical tourism industry. In fact, MPs at the European Parliament considers the patient safety as part of their responsibilities, hence, on Tuesday 27 February, European Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou officially discussed new health strategy to counter balance the will of patients […]
1 Comment » - Posted in medical tourism, preventive care, Medical travel, Hospital marketing by raphael encaoua
Saturday, April 28th, 2007
Competition for customers entices hospitals to better their services
Complaints are rising in the US because of the lack of price and quality informlation and health care. A study from the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA) (february 2007) says the complainers are causing the problems they are so vexed about because unlike in other market qualitative information and transparen,t price are services that are […]
5 Comments » - Posted in medical tourism, Low cost surgery, Screenings and check up, Health & technology, Hospital marketing by raphael encaoua
Friday, April 27th, 2007
Do not talk about what hurts (the ELM model)
According to a nationwide survey of 1000 adults conducted by Opinion Research Corp, Americans spend twice as much time researching car and computer purchases than they do in selecting a doctor, and 6 in 10 say they probably wouldn’t change their ways even if price and quality information on healthcare providers was readily available. It […]
3 Comments » - Posted in medical tourism, Wellness Tourism in Asia, Medical tourism theory, Incentive programs by raphael encaoua
Thursday, April 26th, 2007
Getting over the stitches (part 1)
There has been a sprawling development of medical centers in Asia but more specifically of aesthetical centers with the need of bringing differentiated quality to potential customers. The practice of cosmetic has proved to be very profitable stirring the proliferation of smaller centers whose practitioners pose as real cosmetic surgeonseven though in a country such as […]
No Comments » - Posted in Elective surgery, Screenings and check up, Medical data transfer by raphael encaoua
Wednesday, April 25th, 2007
CHOOSE CAREFULLY: QUALITY FIRST!
Here is a story I found in The West Australian a few days ago. It is one of these botched surgeries that destroys the credibility of medical tourism:
“Jasmine Sheldon, a 26-year-old mother of two is unable to lift her arms over her head and has suffered irreparable muscle damage to her chest after a botched breast enlargement during […]
2 Comments » - Posted in medical tourism, Low cost surgery, Medical travel by raphael encaoua
Tuesday, April 24th, 2007
Providing quality through medical tourism
Tourism Quality has been a well documented matter for the last several years. However, before getting started we should ponder over the notion of quality. Tourism Quality has three components that must be sustained through:
(1) internal customer satisfaction
(2) external customer satisfaction
(3) the efficiency of processes
Satisfaction implies that we must translate subjectivity to […]
2 Comments » - Posted in medical tourism, preventive care, Wellness Tourism in Asia, Low cost surgery, Medical travel, Medical tourism theory, Hospital marketing by raphael encaoua
Monday, April 23rd, 2007
Cosmetic Surgery: little regulation in developped countries for a big taboo
Plastic surgery and cosmetic surgery seem to be two close knitted words. In fact, cosmetic changes is one of the posible consequences of plastic surgery. Therefore there cold be an inclusion of cosmetic surgery as a part of the plastic surgery, a very popular segment indeed as 11 million coswmetc operations in the
US were performed in […]
1 Comment » - Posted in Heavy surgery by raphael encaoua
Sunday, April 22nd, 2007
New FEATURES: the medical tourism map for Asia
As i was flopping around to find some interesting devices to add to this website I finally came to the point that we needed a map. Indeed, medical tourism besides being a blur complex is also a series of places to be known that can be:
+ Hospitals
+ Spa and wellness centers
+ Well known Medical sites […]
4 Comments » - Posted in medical tourism, Wellness Tourism in Asia, Medical travel by raphael encaoua
Saturday, April 21st, 2007
‘MP3’ your tour!
Following our tour of medicasts now let’s take a look on the evolution of tourism videocasts and podcasts. I have surfed on the net in order to find some of the new podcast players indulging in the tourism business and came out with three of them:
Podibus (http://www.podibus.com/). This website offers to download videos of reputed tourist places in France, […]
1 Comment » - Posted in medical tourism, Wellness Tourism in Asia, Medical travel, Health & technology by raphael encaoua
Friday, April 20th, 2007
Medical tourism: a long tail approach
The long tail has been a hot potato among internet theorists. This concept created by Chris Anderson was first designed to explain how the internet could help to increase profitability ob marginal products. For instance if we talk about books, an internet retailler such as Amazon is able to have millions of books in their catalogs while a few […]
No Comments » - Posted in medical tourism, Low cost surgery, Medical travel, Medical tourism theory by raphael encaoua
Friday, April 20th, 2007
Looking on the other side of the road: medical podcasts
Another night surfing to discover the wonderful world of podcasts. And oh my I meet this fabulous trend of medicasts: medical podcasts. Podcasting is a practical way to keep in touch with a center of interest: you only need to subscribe to a podcast to receive a regular flow of information.
nevertheless we have various kind […]
No Comments » - Posted in preventive care, Health & technology, Hospital marketing by raphael encaoua
Thursday, April 19th, 2007
Medical follow up from your couch: the PRM (part 1)
While talking about medical tourism with one of my friends achieving a degree in computing sciences at Centrale Paris, the latter told me to check out Voluntis a specialist in medical follow up. I found this advice extremely interesting as I was still wondering how medical tourism could work without a good follow up service.
Voluntis […]
6 Comments » - Posted in preventive care, Screenings and check up, Medical follow up by raphael encaoua
Thursday, April 19th, 2007
A can’t miss incentive for medical tourism (part 2)
The Blue Ridge example seems to be an isolated one but as Lyn Fox, executive Vice Director of Sales at Global Healthcare choice has stated it in an interview for the employee benefit plan review, the whole is waiting for one S&P500 company to opt for a medical tourism incentive formula to have a huge […]
No Comments » - Posted in medical tourism, Low cost surgery, Medical travel, Incentive programs by raphael encaoua
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007
With a little help from my… doctors
Medical tourism is a thorny commercial product because of a confidence crisis between the customer and the foreign based doctors or surgeons. How could we thwart this major issue?
Best of both Worlds by Planet Hospital - a tailor made solution to ease up the fear of US medical tourism customers
Planet hospital is proposing through their best of both […]
No Comments » - Posted in medical tourism, Medical travel, Heavy surgery by raphael encaoua
Tuesday, April 17th, 2007
A can’t miss incentive for medical tourism (part 1)
The press releases throughout the world about medical tourism are often quoting one example. I would like to also talk about it: the Blue Ridge Paper Factory study case!
Blue Ridge Paper Products is a manufacturing firm in Canton North Carolina, with 2,100 workers. In 1999, while the company’s health care costs were increasing at 18 […]
No Comments » - Posted in medical tourism, Medical travel, Heavy surgery, Incentive programs by raphael encaoua
Monday, April 16th, 2007
Comparing medical tourism and the stock market
In this short log we will try to convert medical tourism into a theory of finance problem (sorry for those for whom the word finance gives pimples):
A customer using medical tourism services has to model by himself all the real options and put a good price on it (see previous article). This price is made out of […]
No Comments » - Posted in medical tourism, preventive care, Heavy surgery, Medical tourism theory by raphael encaoua
Sunday, April 15th, 2007
To fear or not to fear: medical tourism is SMART tourism (part 4)
We have previously established the fact that medical tourism was not only dedicated to heavy operations but could also concern lighter medicalfeatures such as body care or preventive care that makes more sense from a tourism point of view when using the term “medical tourism”.
Now let’s focus on the CUSTOMER of medical tourism, assuming it’s an […]
No Comments » - Posted in medical tourism, Heavy surgery by raphael encaoua
Saturday, April 14th, 2007
To fear or not to fear: medical travel versus medical tourism (part 3)
Serge Fabre is an expert of the tourism Industry. In fact he was during his career Commercial Director of Carlson Wagonlit, then Managing Director of Go Voyages (Number 4 in France actually), Co founder of Cofinoga (a fidelity program called Smiles now) Vice President of operations of Liberty TV (a TV channel dedicated to tourism) […]
No Comments » - Posted in medical tourism, preventive care, Wellness Tourism in Asia, Medical travel, Heavy surgery by raphael encaoua
Friday, April 13th, 2007
To fear or not to fear: joigning tourism and medical care (part 2)
I just have described a mere shock of civilization. This is nothing compared to the revolution that happened while investigating the cultural gap on medical matters between Asia and our western conception.
This revolution happened in a casual way. I had a luncheon after a seminar in Malaysia where I talked with an overweighted American that […]
No Comments » - Posted in Wellness Tourism in Asia, Low cost surgery by raphael encaoua
Thursday, April 12th, 2007
To fear or not to fear: the shock of the civilizations (part 1)
Hi!
I am Raphael Encaoua, a young frenchman. I have been working several years in Asia, mainly in investment banking from Singapore to Vietnam . While travelling in Asia, I often came at grips with the idea of being ill, of having a decease difficult to cure or of sustaining an injury that will be have […]
