Monday, May 3, 2010
‘‘Medical tourism’ gains steam as health care costs rise in US - Phx Business Journal
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Mexico's big hope: get 5 million U.S. retirees
Friday, April 16, 2010
As the Director of Patient Care for MedToGo International, I have 4 years of experience assisting patients in locating qualified surgeons in Mexico and have come across my fair share of irresponsible companies providing questionable services.
How do prospective patients identify these companies?
The most common approach is for a patient to do their own research, ask questions, check the doctor's credentials (which could be falsified), talk with former patients (which could be staged), and read a surgeon's postings (which are often filtered). At the end, someone doing research will spend hours on the Internet and probably absorb as much true information as false information and are left just as in the dark as before.
I regularly speak with a patient at this stage and am instantly made aware of their frustration. I wish to help them, but can sense that they are distrusting after being misinformed so many times already.
Where do they go next?
MedToGo.com is owned and operated by US physicians that have been caring for US patients for 30 years. It is engrained in our DNA as a physician-owned and managed group to provide ethical, responsible, and trustworthy assistance to patients. Observing the doctors' work with our patients/clients, it is difficult for me to imagine that a Medical Tourism company could responsibly walk a patient through the process without having a qualified medical staff on hand.
Time and again, we have had to turn away patients because they were not fit for surgery, or they did not actually require it. We have also lost patients because they grew impatient with our demand that they do all their diagnostic testing and provide us with every relevant detail. This might leave patients a bit frustrated at the initial steps, but the end result is better outcomes.
We realize we are setting the standard for medical tourism and that our number of successful outcomes will speak for itself as these indicators become more relevant. As the only US physician-owned medical tourism company we have a great responsibility to educate other companies on how to provide quality care and minimize errors.
We would like to see a universally recognized licensing and certification program for medical tourism operators. A certification program would teach medical tourism operators and health care coordinators how to follow the protocols necessary to take a patient from A to Z without missing a beat. So many of the issues medical tourism operators encounter could be avoided if they had guidelines.
Until then clients will have no other resource other than to do a lot of research on their own.