The realm of medical services has expanded its horizon by offering global healthcare at much reasonable rates, so patients worldwide can benefit from it. The escalating growth and popularity of the medical tourism sector demonstrates the variety of advantages patients can achieve by engaging in medical travel. The most important and obvious benefit for patients are the low-cost and high quality healthcare options in medical tourism destination, as the healthcare costs in their countries are extremely high. But benefits are not limited to cost saving and high quality of care alone; there are many benefits—if we classify them we can have as many as seven individual categories for such benefits which encourage patients to step out of their geographies. Also, the idea of recuperating from a treatment and relaxing in an exotic location should be enough of a reason to get patients packing their suitcases and heading towards the airport.
Seven benefits of medical tourism for consumers
- Affordability (cost saving)
- Easy accessibility (immediate treatment)
- Availability of services at other destinations
- Better quality of healthcare services
- Privacy
- Personalized services aboard
- Tourism benefits
Challenges of medical tourism that all potential travellers should understand before a decision to avail medical services abroad is made:
- Access to correct information
- Problems with pre- and post-operative care
- Language and cultural barriers
- Coping with infections in foreign countries
- Legal & ethical issues
- Incorrect estimation of costs
- Authenticating qualifications of doctor/surgeon
