One of the biggest concerns that both insurers and potential medical travelers have about going abroad for health care has to do not with going out of the country, but with care locally, in the United States. Who will make sure a prospective medical tourist is fit for travel and an appropriate patient for a chosen destination? Who will care for the patient postoperatively when he or she returns home?

Usually, patients work with their own primary care physicians to obtain pre- and post-operative care, before and after traveling abroad for surgery or treatment. Presumably, these doctors and surgeons will work with their counterparts overseas if necessary, sharing information, particularly in the event of any postoperative complication.

“Presumably” being the key word, here. In real life, the hand-off of a patient’s care from one healthcare facility to another, from one doctor to another, is not always seamless. That is why BridgeHealth International’s announcement yesterday of a partnership with Passport Health is so important. Combining the services of the two companies makes the medical part of medical travel that much safer, providing true end-to-end care for the patient.

See the full news release here:

BridgeHealth Partners With Passport Health

or, as covered by MarketWatch.com

BridgeHealth International, Inc. Partners With Passport Health to Provide Continuum of Care for Medical Travelers

The most important thing for consumers to know, probably, is that Passport Health, which counsels 60,000 clients each month, has 166 locations nationwide in 35 states. That’s a big network in the United States, now supporting medical travel and tourism through BridgeHealth International.

“BridgeHealth is well-positioned to optimize the medical travel experience, providing personalized guidance and expertise that helps individuals to address every aspect of their journey to better health, including options for accessing care prior to leaving the United States and upon their return home,” says Victor Lazzaro, Jr., CEO of BridgeHealth. “This partnership further strengthens our program offering and provides BridgeHealth clients with peace of mind before, during, and after their medical travel excursion.”

For more information on all this, contact BridgeHealth.

A question for our readers: How do you see U.S. healthcare evolving and changing to provide support for medical travelers? Clearly, it’s starting to happen …

As of this morning, a Google search for “medical tourism” returns 1.8 million results. If a reader spent one minute on each page, for eight hours a day, it would take more than a decade to get to the end … and by that time there will probably be some more millions of results.

One of the mantras of medical tourism, as far as advice to people who are thinking about going overseas for healthcare, is “Do Your Homework.” Everyone says it. If you think I’m exaggerating — another Google search, this time for “medical tourism” and “Do Your Homework,” turns up 2,400 references. That’s a lot better than 1.8 million but it’s still a lot to go through for what is liable to be very much the same thing, over and over again, with the possibility that you aren’t going to find what you really want at all.

In the research biz, we call this data smog, a term probably coined and certainly popularized by David Shenk in 1997. As an author, I have learned to live with data smog. Once upon a time, people wrote books about particular subjects because not enough information was available about them. More often in the Internet age, books are written because too much information is available and someone hits on the good idea of winnowing it down. When I wrote Beauty from Afar in 2005-06, medical tourism was somewhere in between those two things and the book’s narrative was shaped accordingly. There are a lot of things in it that hardly anyone knew about, and also a lot about how to find medical information online. Today, there are books such as those in Joe Woodman’s Patients Beyond Borders series, which are more directory-like and represent more of an effort to bring good information out of the smog.

Part of what medical travel companies such as BridgeHealth International consciously do, part of what they bring to the table for consumers, is that they are soldiers in the war on data smog. They travel, accumulate good information, choose hospitals, facilities, surgeons and doctors on behalf of prospective patients; who in turn travel, undergo medical procedures, give valuable feedback on their own experiences.

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That the phenomenon of medical tourism and travel poses political  challenges in the United States is clear, with healthcare costs and quality among the top issues in the ‘08 presidential campaign. What may surprise some people is that, for the most part, medical tourism is not necessarily a controversial political issue.

People from all areas of the ideological spectrum recognize that medical tourism can cut costs for healthcare consumers. There is plenty of disagreement on how to fix the American healthcare system. There is very little about the fact that consumers need relief on the cost of healthcare, and that medical tourism helps with that.

Stephanie Sulger of BridgeHealth International was on the Mario Solis Marich Show the other day — a progressive talk radio program. It’s healthy that medical tourism is being addressed for what it is, in depth, in a bipartisan way. In Beauty from Afar, among my last-chapter predictions was that medical tourism would find its way into the national dialog during the 2008 presidential campaign. Without patting myself on the back too much, I’m feeling kind of “right” about that.

Here’s the first two parts of the interview. Mario is bringing Stephanie back on the show on Sunday to continue the discussion and we’ll update with more audio on Monday.

Part 1:

Part 2:

The first BridgeHealth International web seminar on medical travel and tourism, held Friday, was a big success. More than 40 people stopped in, and I know Will Garin and Stephanie Sulger were working overtime to answer the follow-up questions. The company expects to make the so-called “webinars” a regular event.

If you weren’t there (or even if you were) the webinar was an online slide presentation with an hour of commentary by Garin, BridgeHealth’s vice president of marketing, and Sulger, vice president of the consumer division. You can hear the whole show below, though the slides are too large to fit properly in the blog format. If you want to download the whole presentation with the slides, here’s the link to a windows media file:

BridgeHealth Webinar May 30: 73MB, wmv format

Here’s a link to a file that users should be able to download and play on a Mac or IPod:

BridgeHealth Webinar May 30: 26MB, IPod (m4b) format

Here’s an mp4 file that should play nicely in Quicktime, and includes small versions of the slides:

BridgeHealth Webinar May 30: 34MB, QuickTime (mp4) format

And here’s the inline, on-blog audio (MP3 format.) I’m told it may be unlistenable for Mac users, who are best off with the file downloads above.