HealthGlobe Medical Travel Blog

Updates from the Leader in Medical Travel

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Natural Sperm Magnets – Improve IVF Success Rates

July 27th, 2010 · Anadolu Medical Center, In Vitro Fertilization, InVitro Fertilization, medical travel

Antonio: We were just wondering if it is good to just leave a few things to chance?
Geneticist: We want to give your child the best possible start. Believe me, we have enough imperfection built in already. Your child doesn’t need any more additional burdens. Keep in mind, this child is still you. Simply, the best, of you. You could conceive naturally a thousand times and never get such a result. –Gattaca (1997)

In the film Gattaca, the above exchange takes place between a soon-to-be father and a scientist while they are discussing genetic selection for the couple’s child. While the movie was a science fiction story about genetic engineering in the future, it raises some timely questions that are more science than fiction.

The emergence of Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) has helped hundreds of people become parents by using cutting edge science to assist the natural reproductive process. These techniques have also introduced the possibility of selective reproduction – that is, parents making decisions about their children before conception even happens. While we have not started creating customized babies in the spirit of Gattaca, some technological breakthroughs have changed what we can control about our offspring, raising some tough questions in the process.

Anadolu Medical Center, a strategic partner of Johns Hopkins Medicine International and an affiliate of HealthGlobe’s InVitroGlobe service, has emerged as a worldwide leader in ART-based therapies. In particular, they have gained a reputation as one of the leading hospitals for ICSI In-Vitro Fertilization treatments.  The world-class Anadolu Medical Center is based in Kocaeli, Turkey.

Along with this treatment, they have introduced a technique known as the “Biological Sperm Magnet.” This technique identifies mature sperm cells through a unique protein binding mechanism. The most important benefit to this filtering process is that using mature sperm cells  greatly increases the chances of successful egg fertilization.  And isn’t that the whole point of IVF?

Is this a type of unethical genetic engineering that we should be concerned about? We don’t think so.

Anadolu Medical Center augments its world-renowned ISCI IVF practice with the Biological Sperm Magnet technique. The technique relies on proteins that are naturally occurring in the female reproductive tract. The process mimics the natural advantage that healthy sperm have during unassisted fertilization, thereby resulting in a more natural fertilization process.

While we don’t intend to sound too similar to the geneticist from Gattaca, we do try to understand the delicate nature of any decision about parenthood. At Healthglobe’’s InVitroGlobe business, we want our patients to be informed to make the decisions that are best for them and their families. Providing several options at affordable prices is our way of helping people become parents.

Naveen Rao, MHS
Market Analyst, HealthGlobe International

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What do Medical Tourism and eBay have in common?

July 25th, 2010 · medical travel

Nearly everyone who uses the internet has looked at items on eBay and many people have either bought or sold something. So what does that have to do with Medical Tourism?

When you get right down to it, I am a business strategist. It pervades my thinking when I am working at HealthGlobe and when I work with my other Carter Consulting Partners clients. Because sometimes what makes business most interesting isn’t what’s different, but what is similar between vastly different industries.

So back to eBay. This company has become the largest person-to-person commerce engine on the internet because it has built a brand and a service that individuals implicitly trust. They have taken great pains to be the trusted auction site and it has ultimately brought interpersonal commerce to a whole new level, transforming it from a neighborhood enterprise to a global trading system.

Let’s face it, buying something on eBay isn’t like buying something from your neighbor or someone at a local swap meet. You can’t touch the things you buy on eBay. You can’t look into the eye of the seller and make that critical, subjective determination that their motives are pure. You have to make do with pictures and descriptions. But you trust eBay as a brand, so you can look the other way, and in almost every case it all works out just fine.

Now, anybody who knows anything about Medical Tourism knows that the most critical issue that the entire industry is facing as an obstacle to tremendous growth is trust (and yes, I am saying that the industry is not currently growing tremendously despite any propaganda you may have read to the contrary). Credibility. Legitimacy. It is what I spend more time thinking about than any other issue at HealthGlobe.

Let’s take the example of our most popular service at HealthGlobe: IVF. We provide IVF services through our HealthGlobe brand as well as through our newly-introduced InVitroGlobe brand. We use only the best doctors working at only the most advanced clinics in the world. They have success rates that are far higher than what you find in the US (for a table of success rates as published by the US Centers for Disease Control, click here) and we use public domain reports as a comparison to reduce confusion. A much better service at a fraction of the price; generally 30-50% of what you would pay here in the US.

But even with all that, without our clients’ trust, it’s all just pictures presented alongside facts and figures. Once they decide to make the leap, however, we hear things like this, “I still am amazed at how perfect the whole trip was. I love telling this story to anyone who will take the time to hear it. I want everyone to know about medical tourism, a hugely under-tapped and much needed service for those of us in the US who want or need medical service but can’t afford it on our home turf. Very, very good to know that plenty of well-trained and competent MDs in clean, beautiful, modern hospitals exist worldwide, poised and ready to receive those of us who need them.” What a great testimonial from a Registered Nurse who used HealthGlobe to travel for care.

So with our relentless focus on the best service in the industry and tirelessly working toward a widely-recognized trust in our brand, we will continue to use the values of the successful pioneers of new industries as HealthGlobe’s guiding light in the new industry of Medical Tourism.

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Medical Tourism for my employees? HealthGlobe’s got you covered!

July 15th, 2010 · medical travel

Chances are you’ve heard of Medical Travel (a.k.a. Medical Tourism) and if you’ve done any research on employee benefit plans that include Medical Travel benefits, you have probably come up with lots of hype and found only a few employers making any kind of Medical Travel benefit available to their employees.

There are several companies (many of them HealthGlobe customers) that have incorporated Medical Travel into their benefit plans but it is a long process of education and implementation in each case. This isn’t because it is a particularly difficult thing to do, but simply because it has always had to be done on a one-off basis which requires a lot of work since most large employers work with different vendors to provide their health care services. So every time you need to educate the employer, then the broker, then the TPA and sometimes even the reinsurance carrier needs some cajoling in order to get behind the idea.

HealthGlobe, in collaboration with some of the biggest players in the self-insurance industry, recently introduced a product that we hope is going to start changing all of that. Our Korean Association Preferred Health Plan (KAPHP) program is, as far as we are aware, the first off-the-shelf product that includes a Medical Travel benefit available for employers that self-insure their health benefits.

This development really sets us up to quickly get a significant number of new plans started with offering Medical Travel benefits. What’s more, the fact that we are working with UMR and Meritain, two of the largest TPAs in the US, imparts a significant degree of credibility to the plan and to the fact that it is a professionally-administered service delivering only the highest of quality and customer satisfaction so it is truly an exciting achievement in Medical Travel as an industry.

We are being extremely aggressive with the KAPHP, and have presented one group with a proposal that reduces their total health care costs, on a year-over-year basis, by a staggering 20%. To learn more, get in touch with us at info@myhealthglobe.com and we can help you evaluate the options for Medical Travel as well.

While the KAPHP is currently targeting companies domiciled in Korea with operations in the US and those headquartered in the US with significant numbers of Korean nationals, we are in the process of developing a family of plan designs that can be used by any self-funded group health plan. Learn more at the HealthGlobe web site or contact us directly for more information on how HealthGlobe can help you reduce your health care costs this year.

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Reduce Year-Over-Year Health Care Costs with HealthGlobe

July 13th, 2010 · medical travel

HealthGlobe Co-Founder Jeff Carter describes the frustration of trend increases in employer health care and how HealthGlobe helped one corporate client reduce their total costs by $1M year over year in 2010.

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Coverage, Yes — Cost Control, No

July 8th, 2010 · medical travel

My take on yesterday’s Wall Street Journal article entitled “The Massachusetts Health Care ‘Train Wreck’” in a short entry on my personal blog: http://bit.ly/cSgx7N

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Healthcare Costs Moving Up on “Auto Pilot”

July 6th, 2010 · Uncategorized

Last week, I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at the CFO Core Concerns Conference which was put on by the great people at CFO Magazine. I was able to have lengthy discussions about health care benefit costs and strategies with CFOs from a number of different industries across the country. These conversations gave me some valuable insight into how health care costs continue to escalate unchecked by speaking with the people who figure out how to pay for it: Corporate CFOs.

What amazed me was that most of the people I spoke with simply allocated a 15-25% trend increase in health care costs into their annual budget projections. No questions asked, that’s just the way it has to be.

Um. Why?

When any other vendor walks in with a 15% annual cost increase year after year, there is always at least an evaluation of other vendors to gauge whether better pricing is possible, or even simply to get some pricing leverage against the vendor. But it seems that in the world of health care, benefits are such a sacred cow that companies basically tweak two variables only: employee contributions and co-pay levels.

Frankly, it becomes pretty difficult to blame “the system” for the unending cost increases. If you asked for a 15% raise every year and every year you got what you asked for, why would you ever stop asking? You’d probably just keep asking for as much as you think you can get. So why wouldn’t insurance companies do the exact same thing?

I am not suggesting that if companies started pushing back that there would be a collapse in medical cost increases, but I am suggesting that it is rather shocking that they are not pushing back and forcing a long-term change in the efficiency of the system. Here are my two key observations:

  • BE CREATIVE!! – When your top line revenue or your bottom line profit numbers do not come in the way you had projected, what do you do? You roll up your sleeves, get your best team members in a room and start thinking creatively until you fix the problem. Well, raising employee contributions and co-pays is certainly not very creative. Put strong incentives in place for your employees to consider the cost of their consumption. Medical Travel Benefits are a great place to start, and can probably provide the most significant immediate savings, but there a whole number of ways to reduce your health care exposure.
  • HealthGlobe was able to present a 700 life self-funded group with a 10% year-over-year DECREASE in their stop-loss premium this year because they were using a Medical Travel benefit. That’s before they save money on any claims processed through the HealthGlobe Network. One more time, that’s a year-over-year *reduction* in fixed costs. Contact us if you are interested in discussing how HealthGlobe can help your self-funded plan reduce fixed costs this year.

As we continue to work more and more with motivated decision makers on how to reduce their health care spend, I will be sure to keep the updates coming.

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Patients Without Borders is now HealthGlobe

July 1st, 2010 · Uncategorized

We are very excited to let you know that as of July 1, Patients Without Borders LLC has a new name, HealthGlobe International LLC, a new web address: www.myhealthglobe.com and is introducing a brand new look and feel on the web. Please visit the new site and let us know what you think.

Our original name was memorable and helped us get our start in the medical travel business and we will always look fondly on our early days. Our new name is meant to highlight our unmatched capability to help consumers improve their lives through medical care from outstanding medical centers around the globe – and provide employers with an important tool for holding medical insurance costs down. Specific benefits of medical travel include:

  • Cost Savings. By connecting patients in need of treatment to the highest quality medical facilities around the world, we can make sure they receive world class treatment at very reasonable prices. And we handle all of the travel and pre and post-treatment logistics.
  • Control over Healthcare Decisions. Some countries have significantly higher than average success rates in treating certain forms of cancer. Other countries are best able to use environment, extended monitoring and access to advanced therapies to produce the outcome our clients desire. Our trained Patient Advocates can support patients as they evaluate the availability of treatments that could improve their quality of life.
  • Corporate Control over Healthcare Costs. More and more companies are considering medical travel benefits as a way to control healthcare costs. The HealthGlobe corporate medical travel program allows them to partner with their employees in a creative way to save money on costly medical procedures.

The HealthGlobe brand allows us to create a number of specialty websites that focus on specific areas of medical travel. Our first two are:

  • InVitroGlobe.com – focused on overseas IVF procedures
  • SurgeryGlobe.com — focused on a broad variety of surgical procedures

We thank you for the confidence you have showed us as Patients Without Borders. As HealthGlobe, we will continue to evolve and invest in providing the highest quality medical travel services in the market. We look forward to working with you as we continue our journey.

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Prepped for take-off but still grounded?

June 30th, 2010 · Uncategorized

Here is an interesting link in this month’s Employee Benefit Adviser: http://eba.benefitnews.com/news/medical-tourism-prepped-for-take-off-but-still-grounded-2683657-1.html. The main reason why it’s interesting is because as far as I can tell, Medical Travel benefits offered by employers is very much taking off.

Just two weeks ago, HealthGlobe launched a self-funded “Association Plan” in collaboration with UMR, a wholly-owned subsidiary of United Health Care, and we have received a significant level of interest.

I think the main thing that is being missed in articles like this one is that the decision to make a Medical Travel benefit available is one that requires a significant level of thought around risk mitigation and other factors that individual payors do not need to consider as seriously.

This due diligence can easily take 18 months or more for a large organization to complete. What’s more, these companies are very reluctant to trumpet the availability of these benefits to the at-large public via the press because if the program fails they want to keep it quiet, and if it succeeds it will prove a significant competitive advantage until discovered and implemented by other competitors. In fact, several large employers have already launched these benefits to very little fanfare… intentionally.

I think hindsight will show that employer-based Medical Travel has been moving forward for a year or more already. Maybe it’s still just flying below the radar.

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Core Concerns for today’s CFO

June 26th, 2010 · Benefits of medical travel, Health Care, medical tourism, medical tourism facilitator, medical travel, medical travel facilitator

This week I will speak as a panelist at CFO Magazine’s CFO Core Concerns Conference. We will discuss the impact the recently passed health care reform legislation will impact health care costs. Here’s a recent blog article I posted about why this is so critical for business as we move forward through 2014 and the full implementation of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act: http://bit.ly/cOlDGm.

As the need to control health care costs becomes increasingly critical at the employer level, it seems natural that executives will research, seriously consider and in most cases ultimately implement some sort of Medical Travel benefit for their employees.

Medical Travel benefits have all of the hallmarks that companies look for in “trial balloon” programs. There is generally no cost to implement a benefit and there is no risk since the benefit is not compulsory. The simple fact is that you make it part of your plan and see if people use it. If they do, the employee and the employer are both handsomely rewarded with better care and a massive savings, respectively.

In a business climate where bold decisions generally come with a substantial operating or financial risk profile, why not make a bold decision that has virtually no risk associated with it. Making a HealthGlobe Medical Travel benefit available to members of a self-funded group health plan makes sense no matter how you look at it.

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Single Payer or Single Biller health care? What’s the difference?

June 25th, 2010 · Uncategorized

There is so much public discourse about health care that it is difficult to take it all in. What’s more, there are so many poorly-understood terms that just get thrown around all the time it is no wonder that most of the general public find the whole topic very hard to understand. How does our health care system actually work? Here’s a brief article on the difference between “Single Payer” and “Single Biller” health care: http://blog.cartercp.com/2010/06/is-single-payer-health-care-system-good.html

Enjoy!

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