Medical tourism - Types of medical tourists categorized by patient mobility

Medical tourism combined “Medicine” with “Tourism”. It is mostly known as health or wellness tourism. Nevertheless, medical tourism and health tourism – these phrases are not interchangeable, yet they are being used interchangeably, but with very different meanings, by different interest groups, leading to some readers of the current confusion. According to World Health Organization (WHO), definition of health is a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity, health tourism is the broadest of all possible categories of health-related activity that involves travel. At the international level, health tourism is an industry sustained by 617 million individuals with an annual growth of 3.9% annually and worth USD 513 billion.

In other words, medical tourism is a subset of health tourism. Carrera and Bridges (2014) stated that the medical tourism is “the organized travel outside one’s natural healthcare jurisdiction for the enhancement or restoration of the individual’s health through medical intervention”. Broadly speaking, the medical tourism encourages patients to seek healthcare services while travelling for relaxation and leisure. OECD (2011) defines medical tourism as the process that consumers travel across international borders with the intention of accessing some form of medical treatment. The examples of the treatment are dental care, cosmetic surgery, elective surgery, and fertility treatment.

However, medical tourists can be classified by wider notion of patient mobility as follows:

First, “Temporary Visitors” are patients who get an accident or a sudden illness occasionally. Health services for the temporary visitors are funded variously through health insurance, private insurance, and out-of-pocket expenses. Sometimes these visitors would not be considered as medical tourists or more just unfortunate tourists.

Second, we call “Long-term Residents”. There are increasing flow of developed country citizen preferring to retire in countries other than their home countries. In addition to this, there are growing expatriates (or Expats) in worldwide between 2013 and 2017, with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 3.6%. The CAGR of retired expatriates and corporate transferees are 2.9% and 2.8% respectively. Such residents may receive health services variously funded from their home countries, private insurance, or through private contributions. Third, “Common Borders” has a meaning to economists specific to the ebb and flow of cross-border workers, migrants, and retirees within neighbor countries. Therefore, countries that share common borders may collaborate in providing crossnational public funding for health care services from providers in other countries.

Closer to home, common borders usually drive rather than flies to the medical destination. It may include both medical travel and wellness tourism. Cross-border medical tourism is starting to include Americans crossing into Mexico or Canada, Canadians crossing into the U.S., or residents of South East Asian nations seeking care in nearby countries.

Finally, ‘Outsourced patients’ are those patients opting to be sent abroad by health agencies using crossnational purchasing agreements. In general, such agreements are driven by long waiting lists and a lack of available specialists and specialist equipment in the home country. These patients often travel relatively short or long distances and contracted services (both public and private) are more likely to be subject to robust safety audits and quality assurance. Outsourced patients exactly prefer accessing services at accredited healthcare providers. These individuals could be described as collective‘ medical tourists.

References:

Carrera, P.M. and Bridges, J.F., ‘Globalization and healthcare: understanding health and medical tourism’, Expert Review of Pharmacoeconomics & Outcomes Research, vol. 6, no. 4, 2014, pp. 447-454.

Munro, J.W., What is Medical Tourism? Toward a practical understanding of medical tourism and medical travel, wellness tourism, health tourism and health travel, 1st edn., Medical Travel Quality Alliance (MTQUA), 2012.

OECD, ‘Medical Tourism: Treatments, Markets and Health System Implications: A scoping review’, 2011, https://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/48723982.pdf (accessed 25 July 2022).

Paragon Relocation, ‘New report shows record number of expats worldwide’, 2017, https://paragonrelocation.com/new-report-shows-record-number-of-expats-worldwide/ (accessed 26 July 2022).

Yu, J., Lee, T.J. and Noh, H., ‘Characteristics of A Medical Tourism Industry: The Case of South Korea’, Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing, vol.28, 2011, pp. 856-872.