Many are beginning to cancel trips to Mumbai, India, in the wake of recent terror attacks on the Capital. Citing "uncertainty in the region," six patients—three from the U.S.—have cancelled surgeries scheduled at hospitals there. Experts say most of the patients were traveling there for cosmetic procedures.
A new program on the NHS Web site will soon allow patients to post comments about their GP's performance. Officials say the new system is a move toward greater transparency, and will be moderated to prevent defamation and the identification or rating of individual doctors.
Companion Global Healthcare President David Boucher talked with Fox News last week about how medical travel works. Here, he explains the cost-value equation of medical travel and why it works for some people.
Amid a global recession, high travel costs, and political unrest, Thailand's private health system has become dependent on medical travel. Now, the country is attempting to implement a strategy for future growth—including attracting more patients from North America and Europe.
The HIMSS AsiaPac 2009 HealthCare IT Conference & Exhibition will be held from February 24-27, 2009 at the Kuala Lumpur Convention Center in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The event aims to help health IT stakeholders to connect and exchange ideas in order to help advance quality healthcare delivery through the use of IT.
It will be remembered as the year that shined a bright spotlight on medical travel. Although the concept had been around for many years, in 2008 healthcare leaders, policy wonks, and the media excited the public's imagination that medical travel could be one strategy for dealing with spiraling cost of healthcare in the U.S.
In a year that went by all too quickly, we saw employers add medical travel benefits, popular magazines publicize healthcare abroad, a major medical association issue guidelines, and much more.
Here's my short list of 2008's top medical travel happenings:
The AMA offers sensible guidance. When some members of the American Medical Association voiced concerns about the risks of medical travel, the AMA decided to do some research. In the end, they came up with guidance for patients that no one could argue with. Most importantly, they didn't suggest that care abroad was inferior or risky. And the AMA acknowledged that the patient ultimately should have the right to choose a provider regardless of location.
Two major studies published. First McKinsey & Company released a study that said there were only about 60,000 to 85,000 inpatient medical travelers per year. This was picked up by the Wall Street Journal, which summed up that there are significantly fewer medical travelers than previously reported by global destination hospitals. Some in the medical travel business were critical of the study's restrictive definition of medical travelers. On the other hand, the Deloitte Center for Health Solutions soon after published its own findings that say within two years there could be as many as 6 million outbound medical travelers from the U.S. alone. Both McKinsey and Deloitte should be commended for even attempting to quantify the number of medical travelers and to make predictions about the future. For the medical travel industry, it is significant that medical travel is a trend worth this sort of research effort.
Hannaford proves the world is not flat. As a self-insured employer with some 9,000 covered employees, Hannaford Bros. Co. attempted to change the dialogue with providers in its local market to get them to address the cost and quality of healthcare. As a way of opening the eyes of U.S. healthcare executives, Hannaford decided to add a medical travel option for certain elective procedures, and then quickly found U.S. providers willing to make a counteroffer.
Networks continue to expand. Despite a global recession, David Boucher, president of Companion Global Healthcare, has expanded his network to 13 JCI-accredited hospitals around the world. Most recently, Companion has added Apollo Hospitals in India. Many analysts expect that the U.S. will be the region with the fastest growth of medical travelers. Should employers and insurers embrace medical travel, Companion is a well-developed network to deliver on medical travel's promise.
This might have been the year that hyped global healthcare options—let's not forget that medical tourism stories were featured on the covers of popular magazines like U.S. News & World Report, Fast Company, and the Economist. Perhaps 2009 will be the year that begins to prove the concept on a large scale. And to keep the spotlight on medical travel, the January issue of HealthLeaders magazine will have a cover story about global healthcare. Don't miss it.
The new Evercore-Univision Enterprise Image Viewer was introduced recently in Chicago. The Evercore Univision module is the first non-proprietary distribution of DICOM images and other objects in a standard format that can be accessed using HTML, XML, and using HTTP protocols.
The Institute of Medicine of the National Academies has recommended that the Department of Health and Human Services look to the private sector for effective information technology infrastructure models. Officials say this will provide a tool for analyzing, aligning, modifying, developing, and discontinuing programs.
Many of the healthcare reform proposals put forth by Democrats are expected to carry with them high price tags. A bright spot that exists is potential savings from a requirement for doctors and hospitals to use health information technology, including electronic medical records, as a condition of participating in Medicare. Officials says that such a requirement could save the federal government $7 billion in the first five years and a total of $34 billion over 10 years, by reducing medical errors and avoiding unnecessary tests and procedures.
The Nationwide Health Information Network will become reality very soon when the Social Security Administration performs a preliminary test of the new system in February 2009. The NHIN's trial run will be used to determine benefits eligibility for the SSA's 2.6 million annual disability claims.
The NHIN's rollout—even in its limited form—is considered a major milestone because until now, the public-private "NHIN Cooperative" has only performed trial implementations based on fictitious patients. This test run will have the real-life benefit of greatly decreasing the time it takes to determine disability eligibility, says SSA Commissioner Michael Astrue. "This safe and secure method for receiving electronic medical records will allow us to improve our service to the public by cutting days, if not weeks, off the time it takes to make a disability decision," he said in a release.
The SSA is working with MedVirginia, the North Carolina Healthcare Information and Communications Alliance, and Kaiser Permanente to implement the NHIN. In early 2009, the first exchange of information will begin between Social Security and MedVirginia, with the assumption that if all goes well, the SSA will expand the trial to include North Carolina and Kaiser Permanente.
Work on getting the NHIN up and running has been frenzied since September 2007 when the Department of Health and Human Services awarded contracts totaling $22.5 million to nine health information exchanges to begin trial implementations of the Nationwide Health Information Network. During the fifth forum on the NHIN held in Washington on December 15-16, officials said they fully expect that the millions handed out in federal grants last year will soon begin to yield results as each of the nine HIEs gets up and running and begins to exchange actual health information with the medical community.
But even outside of that funding for those nine HIEs (which can be found here among the rest of the members of the coalition), other states are working hard to create their own HIEs.
Colorado recently announced it has become one of the first states in the nation to share electronic health information securely between hospitals and healthcare organizations at a statewide level. Currently, 500 emergency clinicians are being trained to use the system, which shares a host of health information across emergency departments at The Children's Hospital, Denver Health and Hospital Authority, and University of Colorado Hospital, as well as Kaiser Permanente Colorado. The CORHIO system, which began in 2004, was funded by a mix of federal and state agencies, as well as funding from several insurers.
Meanwhile, Idaho just announced that the Idaho Health Data Exchange will connect two hospitals and a physician group in January 2009 as part of a goal to have 100 physicians and three hospitals join the network by June 2009. That HIE was funded by the state and charges participating fees.
There is no doubt that this announcement from the NHIN coalition is big news. They will soon actually be exchanging actual information that will provide real-life benefits. And each step toward interoperability made by individual states gets us one step closer to that "network of networks" the Bush Administration envisioned occurring by 2014. Now, with President-elect Obama pledging to keep technology and healthcare reform at the forefront of his agenda, is it possible that the nation could reach that 2014 goal?
Based on talking to many of you, I remain doubtful. Yes, these are big steps, but it's going to take many, many more like them to reach the bigger picture of complete national interconnectedness.
Kathryn Mackenzie is technology editor of HealthLeaders magazine. She can be reached at kmackenzie@healthleadersmedia.com.
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