Almost as soon as the travel markets rebounded from the pandemic closures, alleged marketing mavens and carnival barkers began to promote reports, events, certificates and a host of other “medical tourism” market-related products & services designed to separate you from your money. And yet, many otherwise sensible people in organizations around the world latch onto the outlandish claims, and purchase this “stuff”. Not only is this a waste of money, but the misinformation launches failure after failure in the health tourism and medical travel markets. You might say, “consumer beware” but the damage done includes the ability of legitimate organizations to create bona fide programs that could serve consumers, customers and patients. The promulgation of false information leads to unrealistic hopes and expectations.
Quibbling over words?
Defining terms is extremely important. Words have enormous importance. In a court of law, judges and verdicts often hinge on the interpretation of words.
The phrase, “medical tourism” was intended to describe a relatively new phenomenon; consumers from developed economies traveling in quantity to less developed economies to access health & medical services. Almost immediately, the public-relations machines began turning out frothy, excited descriptions of how 14 million Americans would be traveling to destinations outside of the United States to consume medical care. This was (and is) utter nonsense, but the consulting firms and the authors profited handsomely. An association of medical tourism was hastily formed by a few people who had no experience with either medical or tourism disciplines, and its first conferences attracted thousands of people.
An example of fear of missing out (FOMO) at work! These conferences, as energetic as they were, served mostly to reinforce the incorrect speculation that global medical travel would be “huge”; lots of hype, very little substance. We see echoes of this disinformation today as travel markets return at scale from the pandemic.
Juxtaposing “medical” with “tourism” is a paradox that was only supposed to create a media buzz. No one with genuine medical needs would ever be considered a tourist. The World Trade Organization addressed this issue, and created a structure so that words would match the markets. “Health tourism” is the label that includes travel undertaken for health & wellness reasons, as well as medical travel (travel for higher acuity, more serious medical treatments and procedures).
The importance of these distinctions has to do with the reality of the markets. No one who travels for a hair transplant is even remotely like someone who is traveling for lifesaving cancer care. The market dynamics are completely different. Therefore, it doesn’t make any sense to be talking about the “medical tourism industry”. It simply doesn’t exist; the evidence is that there is no such industry classification code. And importantly, the way providers and destinations communicate with health & wellness consumers is completely different from engaging with consumers seeking medical services.
Strictly speaking, the markets for cross-border trade in health, wellness and medical services are highly fragmented and regionalized. In other words, it’s complicated. But this doesn’t stand in the way of those who opportunistically profit from confusion about these words by sowing further misinformation about the words themselves. Those who profited the most from the California gold rush were Levi’s and the shovel manufacturers, not the prospectors.
The conclusion is to always look carefully about what is included/excluded when individuals or organizations are promoting “medical tourism” products and services.
Hyperbole v. Responsibility
Words are also important to better understand any market’s potential and obstacles, which should allow for responsible investment and planning. After all, both health tourism and medical travel are enterprises, which need to either break even or make a profit in order to be sustainable. Most markets operate within predictable ranges based on supply, demand and motivation. The available and reliable data about health tourism and medical travel is scant. Moreover, a significant amount of analysis on the available data is necessary in order to derive solid predictions about how many consumers will travel from point A to point B for cosmetic surgery, or how many patients with cancer will travel from point C to point D for surgery, radiotherapy or other treatments. These estimates and projections must be very specific in order to be reliable.
Beware of hyperbole that lumps all of these customers/consumers/patients together and talks about “medical tourism”.
And importantly, if you have a question about health tourism or medical travel, please get in touch!