Healthcare providers who plan to attract patients who travel for care must have an international patient center framework to coordinate patient relations.
Every hospital, clinic, imaging center, or medical group must not only manage sales, but ust also manage operations, ensure continuity of care, payment, medical records coordination, and organize patient logistics. While the patient is at the destination, the international patient center manages the patient experience, coordinates translation, assures satisfaction, and manages the unexpected. Is yours ready?
Typically, healthcare providers encounter four types of patients:
- medical tourism clients
- random travelers who become ill or injured while traveling
- expatriates and foreign nationals working in the region, and
- pensioners and other long-stay visitors who may spend cold winter months in a warm climate second home.
Collectively, these are international patients. They have distinctly different needs from local patients. Managing their healthcare experience requries special training, preparation, and procedures that add costs, take time, and require special skills and workflows to protect brand image, integrity and ensure exceptional patient outcomes. But if your hospital is accredited or certified by ISO 9001:2008, you will need to document your workflows and business process for the international patient center the same as for any other business process in your organization.
Where to begin?
To develop an international patient center strategy, you must first decide what operations you want to control internally, and which you prefer to outsource and set systems to collaborate. Regardless of which activities you assign to internal and external partners, your international patient center is responsible to:
- manage streamlined patient management protocols
- manage continuity of care before, during and after their medical tourism experience
- anticipate emerging market trends
- influence necessary local regulations
- collect and analyze data to inform about source market persona and preferences
- accommodate for cultural nuances
- ensure return on investment
- build package pricing formulas
- manage global insurance and third-party payor relationships, pre-certification, pre-authorization, claims submissions and denied claims appeals
- manage visa and immigration assistance
- assist with unexpected travel changes
- arrange for translation and interpretation
- coordinate online and offline marketing strategy and tools (websites, content, digital presence, reputation, and branding)
- build re-targeting strategies for repeat business and spin-off business
- preparing data for tourism officials to substantiate GDP contribution and report volumes
- organizing fam tours of the facility for facilitators, insurers, brokers, and employers
- coordinate brand representation and handoffs from medical tourism facilitators, travel agents and tour operators
- managing dispute resolution and mitigating litigation for professional malpractice allegations
- coordinating telehealth consultations between patients and specialists
- coordinating eligibility for clinical trials
- working with brand ambassadors, testimonials and word-of-mouth marketing
- coordinate ground transportation and other local value chain partner relationships and their service level outputs.
Get started now!
We will help you decide on your international patient center strategy, organize and document your policies, procedures, and workflows (for ISO 9001:2008 or international accreditation). We will instruct you on how to implement the use of online and offline tools, techniques, design your marketing strategy and advertising, and streamline or improve process and operations. If you decide to seek international accreditation, we will prepare you for accreditation surveys, site inspections, and revenue cycle activities for international patient services.
Ultimately, we will help you match your market to your target market’s necessities, exceed your market’s expectations, and provide you the model processes and procedures that can leapfrog you to a quick start on the path to sucess with international patient center operations.
