Strategy & Operations
Medical tourists travel for thousands of miles in order to be treated in a different country. Along that comes the cultural differences, language barriers and a general sense of disorientation due to a foreign environment. The emotional effects that patients generally experience when receiving medical attention are enhanced. In some instances this stress can impede the success of a treatment.
Thus it is of the utmost importance to implement the right standard operating procedures that take into account these factors and guarantee professional, efficient and welcoming processing of the medical inquiries sent by international patients.
Many hospitals discover that the obstacles to serving international patients are rarely clinical. Instead, they lie in the everyday operational details: a request that goes unanswered for three days, an invoice that arrives without an itemised breakdown, or an admissions process that assumes familiarity with the local healthcare system. For a patient from the Gulf region, who is often accompanied by family members and may be arranging treatment through an embassy or a medical office, each of these frictions erodes confidence long before the first consultation takes place.
Our engagements begin with a thorough diagnosis of your existing patient journey, from the first enquiry to discharge and follow-up, so that bottlenecks and points of failure are identified rather than assumed. We then translate these findings into practical, documented procedures that your teams can own and sustain after we leave. The objective is not a binder that sits on a shelf, but a set of habits that make every international patient feel expected, understood and cared for.
Next to the comprehensive conception of your Health-Tourism strategy, we offer you and your staff training and coaching in dealing with international patients appropriately. Further, we design Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) tailored to your hospital, with a focus on the following areas:
- Patient flow management
- Waiting time optimisation
- Structuring cooperations
- Working with medical tourism facilitators
- Intercultural communication and training
- Quality proofing external service providers
- Cooperations with embassies, consulates and medical offices
