In the 1990s, during the Clinton Administration, the USA saw many attempts to achieve vertical integration in healthcare. Here we are again! New acronyms were initiated and made popular to describe Independent Practice Associations (IPAs), Physician Hospital Organizations (PHOs), which were managed and administered by entities known as Management Services Organizations (MSOs). Physicians felt the...
Continue reading63 Must Know Data Points to Bridge the Gap on Meaningful Medical Tourism Market Data
You’ve seen it time and time again. Some publisher has published yet another new report that highlights the market size and potential of the medical tourism / health travel / medical travel market size and opportunity. The cost to access this report is often more than USD $1000. And...
Continue reading6 Key Considerations When Targeting U.S. Patients for Medical Tourism
Not getting enough traction with your marketing and advertising efforts towards American patients? Let's talk about it. Medical, dental and wellness tourism providers targeting individuals with specific health conditions may underestimate the challenges attracting North American patients from the USA. The stakes are higher than ever before because of many U.S. healthcare...
Continue reading10 Basic Steps to Medical Tourism Startup
International Hospital Accreditation for Medical Tourism – Who Pays? HEALTH TOURISM MARKETING STRATEGY AskMariaTodd™ …for more information about what’s been mentioned in this article or something else you’d like to learn more about and… Thank You! … for being part of my professional community. Thank you for reading, watching, commenting, sharing, and spreading all...
Continue reading#AskMariaTodd: The Proliferation Trajectory of Community-based, Freestanding Emergency Departments
Recently, I’ve been taking calls from venture capital investment funds and bankers curious about my impression and experience with community-based freestanding emergency departments. Most of the questions are similar: Why this, why now, what’s next, hurdles and obstacles? They also want to know if I can share any...
Continue readingThe Cadillac Tax suspension and what that means for employer paid medical travel
The Affordable Care Act’s high-cost plan tax (HCPT), popularly known as the “Cadillac tax,” is a 40 percent excise tax on employer plans exceeding $10,200 in premiums per year for individuals and $27,500 for families. This caused employers and labor unions who were operating self-funded health benefit plans (Employer Sponsored...
Continue readingShould Concierge Physicians Consider Hiring a PR Professional?
As a concierge physician (regardless of what you call it these days, boutique medicine, membership practice, personalized medicine or something else) if you’ve pulled out of most of your managed care agreements, you’ve lost patient steerage that you were trading in exchange for the discounts you negotiated. Ok,...
Continue readingPerils & pitfalls of methodological nationalism in medical tourism
In Social Science, Methodological Nationalism is a term used to describe an intellectual orientation and pattern in scholarly research and many commercially prepared advertorial and promotional pieces that conceives of the nation-state as the sole unit of analysis or as a container for social processes. So for example, rather than...
Continue readingFormer Hospital Owner Gets Over 5 Years in Prison for Paying Illegal Referral Kickbacks
A former California hospital owner will spend more than 5 years in prison, give up $10 million and liquidate his vintage cars after he pled guilty to orchestrating a 15-year health care fraud scheme involving more than USD $40 million in kickbacks to doctors and medical professionals in exchange for thousands of referrals for patients...
Continue readingHealthcare service design
Healthcare organizations tend to focus around products and delivery channels and customer-facing outputs, while internal processes (UX, employees) are overlooked. Maria Todd focuses on these internal processes in this latest article on medicaltourism and healthcare #servicedesign. Service design is not a new concept. It's been around since 1982. Lynn Shostack...
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