The Bridge is in good company this week, in bouncing off Robin Cook’s medical thriller “Foreign Body.” The Economist led off its own lengthy feature about medical tourism with a reference to the novel, also.

… Central to the plot is the story of Maria Hernandez, a working-class American woman who travels to Delhi to get a hip replacement she could not afford back home. Alas, she and other medical tourists die in mysterious circumstances. Contrast Ms Hernandez’s fate with that of another American health tourist, Robin Steele. Mr Steele, a real patient, recently went to India’s Wockhardt hospital chain for a heart operation. Not only is he in fine shape, but he also enjoyed a holiday afterwards and saved several thousand dollars to boot.

Mrs. Hernandez’s tragedy may sell books, but Mr Steele’s good health is more typical. The future of health care, long one of the most local of all businesses, promises to be increasingly global.

Boldface is added for emphasis. The Economist claims “… to take part in a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.” Apparently, for the 164-year-old journal, medical tourism is, well, just plain smart.

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There is a lot of educated guessing in business and in the media about what motivates medical travelers. I call it “educated guessing” because the evidence available is largely anecdotal — there are no broad-based, scientific surveys of medical travelers. There isn’t even a generally agreed upon definition of what a medical tourist *is.* Are you a medical tourist if you live in San Diego, Calif., and take the trolley and a cab to your dentist in Tijuana, Mexico? I’d say yes … but others, in an effort, perhaps, to better define a market for medical services to which insurers and employers can relate, only count those who travel much further, and for medical care, procedures and surgery that might be (or is) insurable.

I bring all this up because it can get very confusing to try to figure out what matters to medical tourists when there are different definitions of what a medical tourist is. A recent McKinsey Quarterly study, Mapping the Market for Medical Travel, says “only 9 percent of the (medical) travelers seek lower costs for medically necessary procedures …”

That statement is taken somewhat out of context from a report that we’ll be talking about more in coming days and weeks. Most people in the United States with knowledge of medical travel agree that cost is a paramount factor in a decision to seek surgery or other medical care overseas. And the McKinsey article acknowledges that “US patients make up 99 percent of the people in this group.”

So … again, what motivates medical travelers depends on what a medical traveler is, and which ones you’re talking to. As a guide to helping potential medical travelers decide what is important to them, BridgeHealth has released a list of ten key value criteria for choosing a medical travel company. A patient’s motivations, reasonably, can be mapped to the list:

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