Malaysia offers patients savings of up to 30%- 50% of the cost of medical procedures compared to the cost in other Asian countries such as Thailand. For example, a coronary bypass surgery usually costs between $11,000 and $13,000 in Malaysia. The same procedure is performed for as much as $20,000 in neighboring countries.

As part of the efforts to promote the country as a good medical tourism destination, the country will participate as exhibitor in the Healthcare Travel and Exhibition Conference that will be held in the Al Bustan Hotel in Dubai in November 2009.

This was revealed by Nelia Navarro, a provincial director of the Department of Tourism-Cebu. Cebu with the help of the private and public sectors, is positioning itself as a premier destination in Asia for health and wellness.

At the moment, the CHWC is encouraging OFWs to try the services so they can hopefully serve as the industry’s ambassadors. Cebu positions itself as a premier location for healthcare services combining health, business and leisure facilities in the province.

“Our first target is to attract all Filipinos around the world to avail of the best health and wellness services we have here”, Navarro sai.

The CHWC believes that the Filipinos overseas can attract international patients to the country beginning with their foreign friends. They can then help promote medical tourism to the country through word-of-mouth. The group is already in talks with Filipino organization abroad regarding promoting Cebu as a medical tourism destination.

The Philippines is competing with countries like India, Thailand and Singapore as medical tourist destinations in Asia. Patients can save thousands of dollars in medical procedures in the Philippines Navarro said. The medical tourism in Asia earned US $ 120 billion in 2006. Just six years before that in 2000, Asia earned only $40 billion dollars.

In the trial conducted in Singapore 35 patients were covered- 25 from Singapore, 10 patients from Malaysia, South Korea and Myanmar. The results of the study were said to be very promising. Tumors in the liver of the patients shrank, disappeared or remained stable.

The results of the trial are very encouraging for liver cancer patients especially for those who will be part of the trials who otherwise would not be able to afford getting any cancer treatments. Liver cancer is usually treated by removing cancerous cells from the liver. Only one out of every five patients is usually operated on.

Liver cancer is very fatal. In Singapore about 400 patients die from the illness every year. It is the 3^rd largest killer cancer in the nation. There are at least 400 cases of liver cancer in Singapore each year. Western countries do not really pay as much attention to liver cancer because it is predominantly a disease experienced in Third World Countries. The incidence of liver cancer in Asia and Africa is higher by up to 50% than in countries in the United States or in Europe. The primary causes of this type of cancer are Hepatitis B & C which have high occurrence in Asia.

The father had to travel for 24 hours to bring the child to the hospital. By the time the child arrived at the hospital, the baby was already dehydrated with chances of infection. According to A.K. Bisoi, a cardiologist at the hospital, the child is suffering from a rare disease called Thoracic Ectopia Cordis, a rare birth defect involving the abnormal placement of the heart. This case can result in the heart protruding from the chest or being situated in the neck or in the abdominal cavity. The disease is rare and happened only in five to nine cases per one million births. The mortality in such cases is very high with babies mostly dying shortly after birth.

The child will undergo a rare surgery under a team of five doctors. The hospital is conducting the surgery for free because of the economic condition of the child’s parents. The surgery is not the only procedure that will be performed on the child. The treatment for the baby may take many months. Aside from performing surgery on the child’s heart, the chest wall also has to be reconstructed. If the operation is successful, it will be another achievement by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences.

South Korea aims to become a top destination for medical tourism and is targeting foreign patients from Arab states. To foster better relationships between the two nations and to improve their bilateral medical relations, Kuwait will also be receiving South Korean doctors soon. An agreement has been carried out wherein Kuwait will host South Korean doctors that specialize in orthopedic and cancer surgery. The MoH is also considering sending doctors to South Korea for further training. This process could lead to the improvement of the specialties of doctors from both nations.

Korea expects the number of foreign patients to receive treatments in the country to reach nearly 50,000 by the end of the year. There are more than 200 hospitals in South Korea that expressed interest in providing healthcare to patients from Kuwait.

Singapore is among the top medical tourism destinations in Asia. It continues to rise in popularity in the medical tourism industry. The country is visited by about 40,000 medical tourists every year. Singapore aims to get as much as 1 million patients to travel annually to by 2012.

PlanetHospital has works on sending about 3,000 patients overseas every year to receive top-notch medical services from overseas hospitals. According to the company’s director for public relations and marketing Geoff Moss, the company has experienced a 200% growth in business compared to last year’s figures.

Patients visit Singapore for a wide range of health care services. Patients travel to the country because of the state-of-the-art facilities of the hospitals in the country as well as the medical innovations that are performed in the country (e.g. stem cell surgery). Many patients travel to Singapore for treatments of heart ailments, cancer, obesity and surgeries such as knee-replacement surgery.

Patients that go to Singapore to receive medical treatments are usually those with no medical insurance; they usually pay out of their own pockets and by traveling to Singapore, they can save as much as 70% and that already includes the traveling and accommodation expenses in Singapore.

While Tuason acknowledges the importance of getting international accreditation, the group headed by Tuason belives that the satisfaction of the customers is what will help push the medical tourism industry in Cebu, Philippines higher. According to Tuason, ““There is no bigger accreditation than patients telling their friends about the services they received in Cebu”. The group also believes that it is important to promote the services of Cebu hospitals abroad.

The Cebu Health and Wellness Council is a group of private and government institutions whose goal is to promote Cebu as a top medical tourism destination in the world. Aside from world-class medical facilities, Cebu also has world-class tourism destinations that foreign patients will enjoy. Another advantage of Cebu over other medical tourism destinations is the cost. “We offer First-World facilities and services at Third-World prices,’ Tuason said. He added that Cebu is capable of competing with the world’s best hospitals when it comes to basic medical services as well as specialty treatments such as eye treatments, heart procedures, and orthopedic cases.

According to the IMJT report, the IMTA sees no reason why their organization would be singled out when there are many more associations that have been registered with MTA in them. Some of these organizations include the Asian Medical Tourism Association and the Indian Medical Travel Association.

The report also quoted a statement released by IMTA President to its members. According to the statement quoted, IMTA President Ruben Toral said, “The IMTA was clearly the first organization of its kind to serve the medical travel industry; there are over half a dozen associations with medical tourism in their name; and the organization is not engaged in any commercial activity whatsoever.”

The International Medical Travel Association was registered in October 2006 in Singapore while the Medical Tourism Association was incorporated in May 2007.

The official statement reads, “It is unclear why the MTA singled out the IMTA, whose officers and board members perform their duties on an unpaid, voluntary basis.  Several attempts were made to settle this issue amicably, but were unsuccessful and the continuous threat of litigation made it difficult for the organization to carry out meaningful initiatives around quality, liability and continuity of care.”  

The study covered close to 170,000 procedures performed between 2003 and 2006. The overall revision rate is 1.4 percent. For those who underwent the newer technique of hip resurfacing, the revision rate is at 2.6 percent. In this procedure, doctors simply replace the surface of the femur and not the whole joint. For the Unicondylar knee replacement- wherein doctors replace only one side of the knee joint, the revision rate is even higher at 2.8 percent.

The study was conducted by Jan van der Meulen and his colleagues at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. In the published report, Meulen said, “On the basis of our data, consideration should be given to using hip resurfacing only in male patients and unicondylar knee replacement in elderly patients."

The findings of the research are in line with the findings from other countries. The study did not look at the brands and types of replacement products that had the lowest revision rates but van der Meulen said that will be part of future studies.

The private hospital that will be built in Tunisia will be built by the Tokushukai Medical Corporation (TMC). The hospital will initially have the capacity of 400 beds. The TMC group, the Japanese company building the hospital, is the third biggest hospital group in the world with 260 private hospitals. The TMC group is the same company that built the Tokushukai Sofia Hospital in Sofia, Bulgaria. The hospital had such a strong impact in Bulgaria and TMC hopes to have the same impact in Tunisia.

There are 80 private clinics in Tunisia and these hospitals can accommodate up to 2,500 beds. In 2006, there were about 72,000 patients who traveled to Tunisia from the Maghreb region and Europe.