Want more international patients? Then just become an international patient for a day!

I have highlighted a few examples that reflect the strategies (if any) and mentality of many healthcare providers with whom I deal:

• “I am the best in my country and therefore they should come. I do not need to promote myself”
  said one fertility doctor in a Mediterranean county. His statement reminds me of hundreds of other similar statements of “diamond” clinics that are hidden in the dark and no one knows or will ever hear about them.
• “I do not want to respond to patient requests. I will travel to an exhibition in Germany and meet insurance companies. I will sign contracts with them and they  will send patients to me”
  This statement is more of a myth than a highlight. Of course, I have heard similar statements many times. Usually at the early stage of their health tourism project, managers or clinic founders have this same illusion: that they will easily attract contracts for their local clinic with insurance companies that will pay them good rates. They expect patients to be travelling in groups to them. If they remain in the market, they come to realize that this was professional immaturity rather than something that can happen easily.
• “It is against our strategy/ethics  to invest in branding or marketing. We are only looking for an agency or office to send us patients on a Win2Win agreement”
  This view comes frequently from providers with low budgets or a poor understanding of how this market works. When I ask them: “”Why should an agency choose a clinic like yours with no reputation, sometimes in an unpopular medical travel destination that is no different to others”, they don’t have an answer. It’s common sense that any medical travel agent will select a clinic that won’t increase their risk, that provides the right treatments and has already created a good reputation so that the patient will not have to worry about where they are going.
• “We are ahead of others. We are one of the few hospitals that have been accredited and therefore patients will come to us and not to any other”
  Accreditation is important as it helps to support quality and maintain standards. But, as a one-off, it does not mean much in attracting international patients. So far, people who are travelling for health have not been “educated” on the importance of accreditation. Most do not even know what it is.   When I ask my customers how often patients ask them whether they are accredited or not the answer is that patients rarely ask about accreditation. A popular hospital in Turkey stated that only 1 in 450 patients ask if the hospital is accredited.
• “I will just pay someone to send me patient leads and this is enough. Then I will start working. I never anticipated that this would be so difficult”
  This came from a startup agency in Europe. These people obviously thought that buying patient leads without any further action would be enough.  At the end of the year they had received 1,657 requests and not even one patient! The reason is quite clear. Throughout the year, the agency didn’t invest at all in: reputation management, public relations, quality of response, staff training, marketing automation, or enquiry follow. They are not alone. Working with foreign patients should be considered as an ongoing optimization and development process, and not as an one-off action or investment.

I could write a book about the reasons for poor performance in health and medical travel organizations but I’d better stick with some brief advice.

Be a patient for a day

If you are looking for international patients for your organizations, then simply become a patient for a day. Put yourself in a patient’s shoes, think of a treatment for which you would travel and start looking for it. Start visiting clinic portals and write down which one is appealing to you and which one is not and why. Ask questions, get responses and keep notes of the ones that you found satisfactory, the ones you didn’t and why.

Avoid these mistakes with your own clinic or agency. Think of what you as a patient would like to know: doctor’s experience and reputation, hospital reputation, read what other people say, see prices and accessibility, travel directions and when you get responses, you will come to understand this: patient doubts, concerns, queries and questions have to be anticipated. Patient fears have to be eased. Practical information and benefits have to be transparent. At the end the ones which whom the patient stays, is the one who assures them for transparency, safety, quality and reliability.