COVID‐19 shocks and virtual medical tourism
While medical tourism has historically focused on patients travelling out of their home country for medical and hospitals establishing operations in another country, the COVID‐19 pandemic has been a tipping point for providers to develop more sophisticated telehealth strategies to reach patients abroad.
For instance, patients have historically travelled from across the world to the United States for medical care that is not accessible locally or not available at the same perceived quality. The COVID‐19 pandemic has nearly frozen the cross‐border buying and selling of healthcare services, referred to as medical tourism. Future medical travel to the United States may also be deterred by the combination of an initially uncoordinated public health response to the pandemic, an overall troubled atmosphere arising from widely publicized racial tensions and pandemic‐related disruptions among medical services providers.
Unlike other developed economies, medical services in the United States are considered the responsibility of private citizens, rather than a government obligation. Therefore, hospitals and clinics are considered, and see themselves as consumer‐based enterprises. The dramatic increase in the global burden of non‐communicable diseases (NCDs), coupled with increases in wealth among emerging economies create a robust and sophisticated market from which US providers attracted foreign patients seeking treatments. Elective surgeries generated $147 billion in revenue for US hospitals in 2019, and the short‐term halting of and subsequent restrictions on elective procedures has resulted in deep financial losses. In the early phase of COVID‐19, non‐COVID inpatient admissions were approximately 60% of pre‐pandemic levels, and hospital losses were estimated in excess of $50 billion per month between March and May 2020. These unprecedented financial challenges have strained the US healthcare system overall.
American hospitals have shifted attention to domestic healthcare needs and risk mitigation to reduce and recover from financial losses. While both reforms to the US healthcare system under the Biden Presidency and expansion to the Affordable Care Act will influence inbound and outbound medical tourism for the country, new international competitors are also likely to have impacts on the medical tourism markets. In response to the COVID‐19 pandemic, US‐based providers are forging new and innovative collaborations for delivering care to patients abroad that promise more efficient and higher quality of care which do not necessitate travel.
The impact of COVID‐19 continues to create havoc globally as borders open and close depending on spikes in the numbers of cases and the portion of the population that has been vaccinated. The initial responses to COVID‐19 in 2020 were slow and haphazard due to a lack of a coordinated national plan. Each state was and is still left to its own discretion as to the types of measures to take to reduce the risk of transmission, though the mortality rate is dropping. While deaths are decreasing, the total number of COVID cases is remaining steady or increasing as the spread of the disease progresses faster than the vaccine roll‐out.
Therefore, this rapid shift to telehealth is leading to broader access to services, without patients needing to leave their home, and it is unlikely that the efficiencies and market access gained by the increased utilization of telehealth (virtual health) will be rolled back after travel restrictions are relaxed or eliminated.
The future of international patient services across the globe will integrate and expand telemediated service delivery, particularly at the diagnostic and rehabilitation phases of the care continuum for patients who will travel. New cross‐border relationships and collaborations are already being created to share knowledge and expertise, especially in the remote delivery of healthcare services. As a short‐term solution, providers are forging new and innovative collaborations for delivering care to patients abroad that do not necessitate travel.
Reference
Stackpole I, Ziemba E, Johnson T. Looking around the corner: COVID‐19 shocks and market dynamics in US medical tourism. Int J Health Plann Mgmt. 2021;36(5):1407‐1416. doi:10.1002/hpm.3259
