Health Tourism Cluster Development

Health Tourism Cluster
Development Symposium

It's time to stop talking about the potential and start "doing" or you'll never evolve from panel discussions to real, tangible revenues and business success.

Stop listening to countless panelists pitching superficial "shoulds" and "ifs" from the dais about the "potential" of a medical tourism cluster.

Call now to check available dates for your private, onsite symposium +1.303.823.4662

Arrange onsite, practical, hands-on learning at your location with Maria Todd, the leading expert on destination health cluster infrastructure and operations.  

Organize a private Health Tourism Cluster Development Symposium and invest two full days going deep into the details of cluster development and operations. Gain know-how and bring back lessons learned from the only expert in the world with practical experience gained over three decades of successful international health cluster development and three best-selling, internationally-published books on the topic of physician-hospital integration and operations.

  • The symposium is led by Maria Todd, the leading expert with decades of practical experience and a finger on the pulse of emerging medical tourism cluster development and operational challenges and best practices.
  • Attendees from healthcare and health tourism stakeholder organizations participate in unparalleled interdisciplinary networking and collaborative problem solving with national and /or regional tourism, taxation, immigration, consumer protection and other collaborating agencies.
  • Newly-formed or existing stalled cluster organizations include healthcare leadership from participating organizations for training and discovery and to gather concrete pathways for streamlining key operational processes and fostering internal and external cohesion.

TIME TO FACE FACTS: 

Clusters in health tourism are not new by any stretch of the imagination! They are purpose-built and custom designed to match the business model of medical tourism at the destination to the marketplace. In the 1990s, Goldstein referred to this as MMM. There is no “one size fits all” model for a health tourism cluster organization, even though most novice consultants lacking hands-on experience could logically assume so.

STEP-BY-STEP GUIDANCE

To integrate health and other service providers at a destination, a seasoned expert must first survey and analyze the service provider pool, its strengths and weaknesses, preferences, areas of specialization, technologies available and cultural makeup. Otherwise, the consultant risks guiding the development of a misfit instead of a match. 

Building an integrated cluster without cultural and operational alignment always results in a costly mistake and leads to failure. Always. Failure is brutally and bluntly defined as never reaching cash flow and profitability resulting in shareholder distributions. No cash flow, no profitability. No profitability, no tax revenues for the public sector “shareholders” in a PPP cluster. Simple as that. And there are many medical tourism clusters around the world that are by this simple and straightforward definition, massive failures. Many were created by a handful of consultants using the one-size-fit all model. Each time the consultants walked away with full money bags in hand and leaving nothing more than a receipt for the invoice to pay them.

MAXIMIZING CLUSTER EFFICIENCIES

Health tourism clusters operate as destination-branded, management services organizations (MSOs) that are tasked with streamlining redundant stakeholder operations that only apply to health tourism business, PPP investment, stakeholder tax revenue issues, immigration and visa matters for health visitors and/or visiting clinicians, MSO management, staffing, and member governance at a health tourism destination. How successful they are in achieving objectives depends on size, stakeholder engagement, location, laws and regulations in place and those that must be newly-drafted, approved and implemented and enforced.

Arrange two-days of  engaging education and training for integrated healthcare providers, accommodation providers, private equity and FDI investors and government agencies, along with tour operators, travel agents and medical and dental tourism facilitators to participate in hands-on learning in a Health Tourism Cluster Development Symposium and get on the pathway to success and revenues. Maria Todd, a globally-recognized healthcare industry influencer, author and consultant brings the power and how-to guidance to transform your cluster from concept to reality. 

Maria Todd delivers insights from lessons learned by “doing” instead of postulating and pitching from the dais about “ifs” and “potentials”.  She teaches you the specific steps needed to develop and operate effective and successful health tourism cluster organizations and establish cluster member governance processes, quality standards and marketing and payer contracting strategies among competing providers in the marketplace. There’s no other symposium like it anywhere in the world from any other expert consultant. 

Maria Todd is the only globally recognized expert and author  recognized by not one, but two international, peer-reviewed life sciences publishers on the topic of health services integration for health and wellness tourism since 1996.

These books are filled with checklists, tools, tips and explanations you won’t receive from panelists at medical tourism conferences and events anywhere. Order them online and decide how much help you need. Maria proves her qualification to deliver the how-to guidance you need to transform your cluster from concept to reality.

BENEFITS OF THE SYMPOSIUM

When you arrange to bring the symposium to your destination or cluster, the emphasis moves from hearing “about” cluster potentials to interactive discussion and collaborative problem solving. Bring Maria Todd, a seasoned expert with more than three decades of hands-on experience building, operating and marketing over 400 successful clusters to consumers and third-party payers. 

For health tourism, she holds an active trademark registration from the USPTO for a new term of art “Globally Integrated Health Delivery System”. Registered in 2010, this term of art was developed and implemented by Todd from projects and proprietary business operations of clusters she guided from 2005 to 2010. She has since applied lessons learned to continually improve operations and revenue results in the USA and abroad. Want to read the books first? No problem! They are widely available through every retail and online bookseller.

Maria Todd’s proven approach empowers attendees with different professional vantage points to work together to achieve excellence in capacity development, IT and operational infrastructure and workflows, staff training and development for the variety of roles and responsibilities of cluster operation, sales and marketing and public and provider relations, and later on, the possibility of insurance plan contracting. 

 

Providers and investors work collaboratively in an integrated management organization and some of the profits come from economies of scale and lower stakeholder overheads. 

  • Well-designed, effective cluster management organizations realize efficiencies and alleviate the burdens of redundant (every supplier for himself”) actions and tasks.  
  • When operations are transparently centralized and standardized across competing hospitals and other health providers and accommodation partners, labs, imaging centers, and medical, dental and mental health professionals and their marketing teams, all the members experience enhanced benefits of participation. 
  • Referral steerage and inquiry call centers are easily centralized using a variety of approaches selected by the stakeholders. 
  • With a checks and balances system of referral steerage and inquiry management, quotation response times improve and enumeration of traffic, volumes of revenues, and measurement and evaluation and outcomes reporting are standardized across the cluster.
  • When the right software is implemented, there is no need to reinvent or invest in development of untested, home-grown software solutions to operate the cluster or call center – it already exists, has been tested, and it is very inexpensive to license and use.
  • Taxation on profits can fund public health support at the destination through earmarked, tax increment financing programs that come directly from health tourism revenues, thereby satisfying PPP missions and objectives. 
  • Among cluster participants, pricing models are developed to include a small administrative overhead increment to fund the sustainability of cluster operations and staffing. This eliminates the need to call for cash to manage and sustain operations – but only if revenues are realized. If you build the wrong cluster model or an unappealing product that market neither wants nor needs, nobody realizes revenues and the cluster stakeholders have to contribute cash to keep it in business.
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