What is medical tourism?
In the eyes of everyone, Medical tourism consists in travelling abroad to get a cheap operation…
To us, this is Medical TRAVEL!
Medical tourism is an experience that involves medical travel but also a pre op and post op management that is optimaly drawn up through tourism. What is the connection between tourism and pre and post op? Simply put, this connection is indirect as pre op and post opcan involve alternative medecine such as axcupuncture, ayurveda, reiki, shiatsu, hydrotherapy (…) to relieve the patient from any post op issues such as nausea, wound healing, cardiovascular conditioning, stress disorder (…).
All in all medical tourism does no imply only cost savoings but also a complete medical experience designed to help patients to better manage their conditions and relieve them from the direct shortcomings of their surgery. Medical tourism converts medical travel, a dreadfully stressing experience, into a POSITIVE experience as it aims to TREAT and to PREVENT.
In fact, all the agencies on the market are selling medical travel not medical tourism. We are writing this blog to put in perspective the potential evolution of the Medical tourism business model not to make any recommandation about an hospital or to make price quotation to someone in desprate need. There are some good medical travel agency on the market that can be easily found on the net.
Together with a series of partners specialised in preventive care, medical IT and tourism we are currently developing a Health Tourism company called VivaDoc and based in Singapore.
Our concept consists in promoting Asian medical culture through its alternative medicine and top notch spa. We are still pondering over the possibility of launching on the short term some medical tourism packages but we are sitting on the fence as we need to understand what people really need and how to bring a maximum value added besides concierge services that some company are already doing well.
