Where to go? What to do? How much does it cost? Aaaaaah!
Let’s start with the starters!
Where to go?
According to many medical travel agent you have to go to an hospital wherever it is. Cardiology in Mexico City seems to be equivalent to cardiology in Singapore. But hell no! Hospitals have different specialties, different level of expertise. At the end of the day, the success rate of an operation depend on the hygiene of the medical facilties but on top of all to the intrinsic quality of the surgery team.
Medical tourism agencies are hardly putting forward the success rate of hospital per operation (some hospitals not willing to communicate on success rates (a bad signal nonetheless!). Medical tourism agencies are trying to promote destinations and create a mix of sight seeing and scalpel seeing… As if you had to pay more heed to the Sleeping Budha than to you faltering heart…
My advice is to choose your hospital according to the success rate of the surgery you want to be performed: it looks stupid but your aim is to come back home alive and most importantly WELL. So the second criteria is the quality of the services provided in terms of post operative care (use of alternative medicine in dedicated clinics connected to post operation recovery).
The equation
- HOSPITAL = MAX(SUCCESS RATE) + POST OP SERVICES
Prices? Come on! Prices!!!!!!!!!!
People are always wondering why medical travel agencies are not able to give a price… In fact, pricing a priori is quite difficult as hospitals will decide on a price after a careful assesment of your condition. There is no fixed prices for a surgery but there is still a range of price! To my knowledge only Planet Hospital is giving the possibility to review price ranges. Yet, there are sometimes not relevant: for instance, the price range for an angioplasty is 3650-6300 USD, as Planet hospital is including a large pool of hospitals, ths not reflecting the appropriate price - quality implicit ratio that push people to make the best decision.
How is it working then? It s a ping pong back and forth game: you send your medical records to a medical tourism agent that will come back to you after carefully checking your condition and will set up a meeting with several surgeons that could perform the operation. After several weeks we have a quotation in hands: there is hardly any shortcut.
Nobody wants to publish prices as it is consider as an industrial secret that must be kept conscpicuous (to prevent new entrants to come)
So prices can hardly be found, you unfortunately have to believe that it will be cheaper anywhere else than in your country and abode by the rules by getting in touch with surgeons directly.
