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 …

In yesterday’s interview with Dr. Miguel Alfaro of Costa Rica, he candidly noted that the number of plastic surgery patients coming to Costa Rica from outside the country is down by perhaps 15-20 percent in 2008. This should surprise no one, given the state of the economy in the United States. In fact, Costa Rican plastic and cosmetic surgeons are probably weathering the economic slowdown better than are their higher priced counterparts in the U.S. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons estimates that business is down more than 50 percent, according to CNN, as reported by the Business and Media Institute.

The market for cosmetic procedures in Costa Rica, Mexico and other medical travel destinations has held up better than the U.S. market primarily because of the large price differential and because more Americans than ever before are aware that plastic surgery abroad is a relative bargain. Plastic surgery and dentistry travel (or both, combined) remain among the top choices of BridgeHealth International clients in 2008. People who might have opted for procedures costing $10,000 to $30,000 or more at home are instead getting the same work done abroad for perhaps $3,000 to $10,000.

The CNN report linked below looks only at the sharp decline in cosmetic surgery in the U.S. We thank Dr. Alfaro for his estimate regarding patients in Costa Rica. The video is better viewed on their site due to the format of the file.

Plastic Surgery’s Nip: CNN

Costa Rica was among the first well-known destinations for modern medical travel, dating back to the 1970s and early 1980s when some pioneering plastic surgeons and dentists first began serving international clients. Among them was Dr. Miguel Alfaro, who, like many Costa Rican surgeons, came to medical school in the United States and was trained in general and plastic surgery at the University of Colorado; the University of Missouri and the University of Michigan. He returned to Costa Rica in 1976 and worked for years for the country’s public health care system, while building his private practice in plastic surgery on the side. Most recently, Alfaro has been chairman of the Department of Surgery at Hospital San Juan de Dios in San José, Costa Rica.

Among other professional associations, Dr. Alfaro belongs to the International College of Surgeons; the Costa Rican Plastic Surgery Association; and the Plastic Surgery Association for Iberoamerica. He is a Fellow of the International College of Surgeons, a member of the American College of Surgeons and a Founding partner of the Costa Rican Association of Mastology.

Alfaro prides himself on being a conservative plastic surgeon and has built his international reputation in plastic surgery on excellent results as well as a safety record that is second to none.

“I have very good results,” he said in a recent interview with The Bridge. “I have done thousands of operations and I am very conservative … I mean, if I see a change in technique going on, I will wait a few years, frankly. I want to be sure it is safe, see what complications are encountered by others.”

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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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