The next generation cross-cluster IT-enabled platform to enable the exponentially growing globalized healthcare market

Traveling for medical treatment is known to mankind since antiquity. The advancements in elective medical procedures during the fourth quarter of the 20th century saw patients from less developed countries seeking medical treatments in sophisticated hospitals in developed countries. That was an era of “word of mouth” or “solo” marketing.

The end of the millennium saw the very high cost of western healthcare compel patients seek medical treatment in developing countries with good quality low cost healthcare infrastructure like Thailand and Singapore. Clusters of high quality hospitals and healthcare cities started coming up in countries from South America to East Europe, Middle East and South Asia. This led to “cluster marketing” through caregiver associations/syndicates or medical tourism facilitators replacing the first generation “word of mouth” or “solo” marketing approaches.

Medical tourism is a complex business that is influenced by many diverse disciplines and stakeholders, such as home caregivers, offshore caregivers, patients, payers (insurers, employers, governments), brokers, pharmacies, hospitality and travel industries, so on and so forth. Today's cluster marketing strategies, although may have increased the revenues of the offshore hospitals, do not engage all the healthcare stakeholders, and clusters within them. As a result the hospital services are sold to each patient individually and handled piecemeal by different stakeholders to accomplish the complete patient experience consuming a lot more time, cost and infrastructure resources that add to patient inconvenience. A recent independent research projects 16 million Americans to travel overseas for medical treatment by 2017. Such high volumes are impossible to handle by current cluster marketing infrastructure, which focuses exclusively on offshore caregivers. If caregivers are heart and soul of healthcare industry, payers pump life into it. Without engaging payers and the other stakeholders, medical tourism cannot grow as predicted. It is indeed a challenge to integrate such unprecedented diversity into a seamless platform that harmonizes the heterogeneity inherent with global healthcare business processes. Our novel patent pending technology platform “Offsurance” achieves this feet of cross-cluster implementation of the interests of each one of the stakeholders. The eleven modules of the Offsurance platform not only allow en mass patient handling but makes medical travel as integral part of a single payer healthcare system that the patients are used to.