Medical Tourism is on the rise with companies like RefreshMed, Xetica and Procrearte in the lead.
For the past three years, “medical tourism” has been a loosely-defined concept occasionally surfacing on the pages of popular magazines. In 2006, Time ran a story titled “Outsourcing Your Heart,” while Entrepreneur named “medical tourism” to its 2007 Hot List of emerging trends and business models for aspiring entrepreneurs. Fast forward to 2009 and the industry buzz around medical tourism is large enough to warrant a World Medical Tourism & Global Health Congress, being held next week in L.A.  Going forward, Argentina is poised to capture a greater share of outsourced U.S. health care over traditional destinations like Inida, Thailand and Singapore. Similarities in time zones, language and countless tourism options are just a few of Argentina’s competitive advantages. And just to make it official, Argentina’s National Tourism Agency, finally decided to go after this $60 billion global industry with a marketing campaign (Full Story) called Medicina Argentina.
I saw a feature a couple of weeks ago (CNN, I think) about a Canadian who went to BA for cosmetic surgery. It looked like a pretty good deal.
Yes, we posted that article last month. The patients were clients of two of the companies mentioned in today’s post: Xetica and RefreshMed. Here is a link to the other article…
http://investba.com/2009/09/plastic-surgery-on-a-budget-in-ba/
Look who the major country sponsors are for the Medical Tourism Congress: Korea (Diamond), Malaysia (Platinum) and Colombia (Gold). At least Argentina factors into the mix at the Silver level, but this needs to be a serious, sustained, long-term investment with serious backing from the Argentine government and the tourism board.
Regarding Brian’s comment… I represent Xetica Argentina (one of the facilitators mentioned in the article) and we are working along with Inprotur and Fundación Exportar in a long term plan for positioning Argentina as a healthcare destination.