Challenges and opportunities in the Philippine Medical Tourism Industry

By   Ma. Aurora Geotina Garcia and Camille Alessandra M. Besinga

The Philippine Medical Tourism Program is seen as a viable solution to some of the problems
beleaguering the medical industry. But for government to achieve success in this industry, certain
challenges need to be addressed.

 In developed countries like the United States or the
United Kingdom, medical and health care services are expensive. With the
steep cost of treatments and long waiting periods for insurance approval in
their home countries, some patients book flights to Thailand, India, or other
Southeast Asian countries to go under an Asian doctor’s knife. Despite a
lack of insurance portability in Asia, a number of foreigners are driven to
seek medical help in this part of the world because of the significant price
differential between costs of medical services in a developed country like
the US and a developing country like Thailand. This alternative has been
christened “medical tourism.”

Medical tourists travel to other countries to avail of medical services and/or
to undergo healthcare and wellness treatment. The objective of medical
tourism is then integrated into specially designed travel tours around the
patients’ host country. Aside from high medical costs (caused by insurance
and regulatory fees) in developed countries, other drivers to medical
tourism include favorable foreign currency exchange rates in the global
economy, rapidly improving technology and medical practice standards
in other countries, and of course, the “tourism” element in the equation.
Countries like India, Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore have been running
profitable programs in this industry since the 1990s. The Bumrungrad
Hospital in Bangkok, one of the premier hospitals in Thailand, takes in
more than 350,000 foreign patients a year. The Apollo Group of Hospitals,
the largest hospital group in India and the third largest in the world,
leads the country’s health tourism program. According to the Philippine
Department of Health (DOH), these countries earned US$600 million in
revenues in 2005.1 Globally, medical tourism is a US$20 billion industry.

After the astounding success of India and Thailand in this relatively new industry, the Philippines is now
quickly following suit. Leveraging several factors such as the country’s hospitable, English-speaking, highquality medical labor force and competitive costs of services, the Philippine government envisions the country as the “new hub of wellness and medical care” in Asia. The Philippine model is relatively new, having been launched only in January 2006. However, the DOH claims
that medical tourism in the Philippines began way back in the ‘70s, when
then First Lady Imelda Marcos established the Philippine Heart Center and
Philippine Lung Center to provide various cardiovascular and pulmonary
treatments to patients in the Southeast Asian region (doctors, nurses, medical students, and other healthcare professionals from all over the country
and from other Asian countries studied, trained, and practiced their specializations
in these hospitals). The current program, called the “Philippine
Medical Tourism Program” or PMTP, aims to solidify the medical and
health and wellness service industries to cater to the foreign market.

 Medical tourism in the Philippines

The National Statistical Coordination Board recorded 1.907 million tourist arrivals in the country from January to September last year, bringing in PhP94.524 billion in international tourism receipts. About PhP29.257 billion was collected in the third quarter of 2005 alone. While the DOH admitted that it has no data on the number of medical tourists in past
years, it is possible that some of these tourists availed of medical services during their stay in the
country. With a solid program in place, the government hopes to attract 700,000 foreign medical
tourists annually3 – about 40% of last year’s tourist arrivals in the first three quarters – to achieve almost
PhP1 billion in revenues.

...Read the full article at: http://www.ey.com/global/download.nsf/Philippines/SGV_Review_June_2006/$file/sgvreview_june2006.pdf