BMI Healthcare develops its international services

Leading British hospital group BMI Healthcare is developing international services to attract more overseas patients. Although it has many hospitals around the UK, most international visitors go to the 12 hospitals and clinics in London, the centre of the UK medical travel trade.

Over the last year and a half BMI Healthcare has focused attention on developing international business, with a goal of treating many more international patients. In the last 2 years it has seen an 82% growth in the number of international patient treated. Most of these are traveling for procedures unavailable, too expensive or difficult to access in their home country.

The international market is split into three groups; government sponsored patients, insured patients living or traveling in the UK or self-paying patients from overseas.

The majority of the patients at BMI are government sponsored patients from the Gulf regions of the Middle East. This has meant an investment in infrastructure, with multi faith prayer rooms, a car service, appropriate food and media as well as on site Arabic speaking liaison. It has recently produced a brochure in Arabic.

BMI Healthcare treats international patients from embassies and international insurers as well as patients choosing to pay for their own treatment.

International patients from around the world are supported by patient coordinators in an international patient centre. This helps international patients with accommodation, local travel arrangements, interpreting services, arranging medical appointments and hospital admission in all UK hospitals and treatment centres.

The BMI Healthcare Embassy Appointment Line is an exclusive centralised appointment service for London based health offices that provides a direct outpatient booking service with any of its 7,000 consultants. It can also arrange admission to any hospital and ensure that consultant appointments, transport and translation services are coordinated for patients from London based embassies.

The company has launched a range of hospital package prices for a range of routine procedures. These packages include all the normal investigations and procedures for a particular operation for a fixed length of stay. Prosthesis is usually excluded from the package as this can vary in price depending on the individual needs of the patient and the consultant recommendation.

BMI Healthcare treats a large number of self-paying patients from overseas. Each year the group sees over 1 million outpatients and perform over a quarter of a million operations; although it is reluctant to reveal how many are from overseas.

The group is Britain’s leading provider of independent healthcare with a nationwide network of hospitals and clinics performing more complex surgery than any other private healthcare provider in the country. It also offers cosmetic surgery, fertility treatment, weight loss treatment and health assessments.