ROLE OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY IN MEDICAL TOURISM Sonali Parkhi Asst. Professor IBMR (MCA Deptt.) sonaliparkhi@asmedu.org Abstract This paper contains introduction of the term medical tourism. There are three categories of medical tourism like Inbound (patients will come from outside countries to us), Outbound (our patients go outside countries for treatment) and Intrabound (Inside country patients travel from one city to another). This paper discusses the life cycle of medical tourism. It throws lights on business opportunities in medical tourism. It also discusses healthcare sector in India. Also it discusses about usage of Information Technology in Medical tourism. 1.1 Introduction Medical tourism occurs when a patient leaves his or her local area for medical treatment. The Deloitte Center describes three types of medical tourism: Outbound; Inbound; and Intrabound. In the context of this article, outbound tourism occurs when a person from India comes to the United States for medical care. Inbound tourism occurs when a hospital treats foreign patients or Americans who have traveled to India for medical care. Intrabound tourism is characterized by a patient traveling to a different geographic area for treatment, but the patient remains in his or her home country. 1.2 Objective of the Study The first step in any research is deciding what we want to learn. The objectives of the project determine whom we will survey and what we will ask them. If our goals are unclear, the results will probably be unclear. Objectives are the keys to proceed forward in any research. To find out whether the customers satisfied with the available facilities. To find out how do the customers feel about the treatment carried out in INDIA. To find out which nation/state do the customers come from. To find out what are their basic expectations form the tourism package. To find out what are the sources through which they came to know about medical tourism in INDIA. 1.3 Lifecycle of Medical Tourism The very first step for medical tourism starts when a patient seeking medical treatment overseas either contacts a medical tourism operator or directly contacts any hospital s international liaison office for admission. Many international level hospitals have their specially trained staff s to entertain foreign patients. The patients provide their current medical reports, either to a consultant at medical tourism company or a doctor from the hospital, who later on provides feedback on their medical condition, recommended treatment, and cost and duration of the treatment. Then either the medical operator or the hospital's international patient department provides information about whether a visa is necessary and instructions on procuring a visa. Sometimes this requires an invitation 1
letter from the hospital, depending on the country. The patient then travels to the hospital to undertake the procedure, usually coordinated by an on-the-ground case executive assigned to the patient. Often the patient will tour the country before or after the procedure is completed. 1.4 Medical Tourism Business Opportunities and Ecosystem Medical tourism can provide great business opportunities by collaborative effort of multiple service providers to the tourists. While hospitals and treatment can be primary purpose for the patients, specialized medical tour operators can provide all required services and can become one stop service providers to these medical tourists. They can provide information about hospitals, book the same for patients, arrange or support visa processing, provide additional support on tourism after treatment, and also help to contact necessary insurance companies in need. So following are few key entities which can collaborate effectively to provide all necessary services to the medical tourists. 1.5 Medical tour operators 2
Medical tour operators can play a very important role who can be one stop service providers to the customers. They should have an integrated set of applications linked with hospitals, insurance providers, doctors and pharmacies or blood banks. So through this application, tour operators can book a hospital for the medical tourist, they can search the best doctors in related areas, get ranking from socially connected people, they can fi x an appointment based on availability and also book hotels and fi x travel itineraries for the medical tourists. During treatment these applications should provide facilities to collaborate with pharmacies in need of rare medicine. They should also be able to talk to insurance providers for supporting patients in that area. Community of doctors: There should be a community of doctors on related specialization areas. Today, if we visit the website of any hospital then we see only the specializations and set of doctors who are associated with that hospital but need of the day is really a set of specialized doctors connected over social networking platform through specialized group formation and who can collaborate on demand in need of a specifi c discussion or decision. So this kind of advanced medical tourism applications should provide that facility of collaboration with specialized doctors regarding appointment & discussion. There should also be facilities for discussion among the patients and doctors on need, should have options to provide feedback by patients, and discuss with other similar patients. Specialized hospitals: Ideally there should be a set of hospitals connected with this application and provide necessary services. These hospitals can register for these offerings to these providers. Today if we visit travel operators sites it gives us lowest cost airfares but this similar facilities can be enhanced with hospitals too. Medical tour operators or medical tourists can provide their requirement and can search for best possible hospitals with lowest per day expenditure and tourists can book the same. Medical insurance & travel insurance providers: Insurance providers can also register for their off ers. Like hospital search patients can go for best insurance providers that match their requirement and buy the same instantly. Hotels: Hotels can also play a great role in this ecosystem. They can also register with their off ers & promotions and like hospital search, tour operators & tourists can search for best possible deals. Pharmacies & blood banks: Pharmacies & blood banks can also play a great role in this ecosystem by providing necessary lifesaving drugs or rare group blood. Today we need to visit all the stores individually to search for life-saving drugs. It also takes ample time to visit multiple blood banks in search for rare group blood. But if these pharmacies & blood banks also join in the ecosystem then these applications will have the real value. 3
1.8 Information Technology in Medical Tourism Technology reached big time in medical tourism and evolving rapidly to provide the best of breed facilities for medical practitioners across the world. Web 2.0, Cloud Computing, Mobile Technology etc. are making its way deep into the world of medical research. Geographical barriers are going to blur when an Australian doctor takes lesson on some typical surgeries from his American friend using web 2.0-based video conferences. 24X7 medical facilities are now available on toll-free telephone lines, Internet connections, while international credit cards, instant banking facilities, easy loan sanction, web-based payment gateways, health insurance made medical tourists life much easier. So if look at these aspects, three broad technology areas can work hand-in-hand in building an effective medical tourism solution. One is surely cloud because medical information details like EMR can be made available across worldwide for each patient through low-cost solutions in cloud. There can be cloud-based offerings which can host medical records of the patients with minimum fees annually and all medical tourism solution providers and doctors can access the same records with the access information. Whenever there is any test in any part of the world these medical reports can be updated. Now social collaboration & networking will also play a major role. Doctors, patients, tour operators, and hospitals should be wellconnected through social networking. What is electronic medical records(emr)? Changing ways for disseminating information using Information Technology has propelled the medical world for a slow transition from paper-based medical records maintenance to Electronic Medical Records (EMR) management. EMR contains things like Clinical Notes, Medical Administration Record, Result Review, Discharge Summary etc. Some of the major benefits of EMR can include following: 4
1. Replace paper-based medical records, which are incomplete mostly, hard to read and hard to find, with a robust set of information that brings advantage of easy retrieval, available anytime and anywhere. 2. Easy for automating, structuring, and streamlining clinical workflow 3. Providing integrated support for wide varieties of caring activities like decision support, monitoring, electronic prescribing, laboratory ordering etc. 4. Maintain data set needed for medical audit and quality assurance, disease surveillance etc. 5. Support for continuing medical Doctors can take suggestions from other doctors, while patients should be able 6. Analytics & trend analysis of medical reports EMR along with other information technology support can make the world smaller for patients seeking consultancy from foreign doctors. But the success of this depends totally on the implementation of EMR and other facilities in all hospitals and healthcare facilities. On top of that, EMR can alleviate medication errors and need for repeated diagnosis and testing to harness the power of healthcare systems. So, it s definitely a matter of massive investment to convert healthcare industry to a paperless one. EMR on Cloud Cloud computing has rocked the world in recent times, which allows users to pay monthly subscription cost to access their system hosted in cloud. This removes the need for managing expensive infrastructure of its own to carry the hosting cost of running system. Software as a Service (SaaS) is a product, which some of the big companies are facilitating across the world to their clients for about a decade. There are quite a number of cloud-based EMR: No upfront software license purchase cost No hardware purchase to maintain Better overall support, including disaster recovery Strong security and data protection mechanisms Role of SmartPhone Smartphones and Cloud jointly can redefine the healthcare infrastructure. Cloud is adding its power with smartphone to enhance the power of computing and remove the bottleneck of latency. Now EMR accessible from smartphone would be a new era buzz. So, if a cloud is imagined with a federation of EMR, which is accessible from Cloud Phones, then it would be a revolution in medical healthcare industry. Data Mining and EMR Data mining puts a deeper impression in healthcare sector. Continuous effort on collecting data from different sources like medical journals, live case studies etc. can help create a huge repository of disease-diagnosis system. People can carry their own medical records on their smartphone, which will remain encrypted for security and requires a password to access. The application generates a one-time password that has to match with a server to unlock the app. Low-bandwidth data remains in the phone itself, like immunization, allergy records etc. While more data intensive information, e.g. X-Ray, CT-Scan are stored in server for on-demand access. Now Information Technology can provide a great contribution here. Intelligent decision making systems have already been deployed in various efforts to drill down raw Electronic Health Records (EHR) to find pattern for individual patient or some sample population to help detect disease or any potential threat of diseases. Data Mining systems can come in place to create a global repository in Medical Cloud-based infrastructure to serve it as Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) to medical world and individuals. This in turn would help Medical Tourism Industry inside a country or globally by advising patients to take best possible and costeffective treatment of affected disease anywhere in the world. 5
Various tourism organizations and insurance companies can join into this federation of human welfare to complete the circle of helping people by making them as part of this association. While Medical Cloud will assist in detecting disease and will suggest the best spot with budget-based treatment in any country and globally, at the same time social networks & communities can always provide instant consultancies and suggestions. Pharmacies can also join in it to complete the circle, by making a voluntary contribution of delivering any medicine needed to save a life at anytime and anywhere in the world. 1.8 Research Methodology I have prepared a questionnaire of 20 questions. The questions are related to use, information and benefits of medical tourism. I am trying to collect the data of patients who have travelled from pune to elsewhere or from other places to pune for medical help. I am using internet as well as personal visits to patients to collect data. 1.9 Future Work DataMining systems can come in place to create a global repository in Medical Cloud-based infrastructure to serve it as Business Process as a Service (BPaaS) to medical world and individuals. This in turn would help Medical Tourism Industry inside a country to take best possible and costeffective treatment of affected disease. An integrated system can come in place to glue the thread between hospitals, clinics, medical research universities to share knowledge for the wellbeing of mankind. Various tourism organizations and insurance companies can join into this federation of human welfare to complete the circle of helping people by making them as part of this association. Pharmacies can also join in it to complete the circle, by making a voluntary contribution of delivering any medicine needed to save a life at anytime. Helplines will also remain available in multilingual format to help people for any immediate crisis management. 1.10 References 1. Medical Tourism Private Hospitals: Focus India Billie Ann Brotman, Journal of Health Care Finance 37.1 (2010): 45-50. 2. A study of problems and challenges faced by medical tourists visiting india, a study by Indian institute of tourism and travel management in 2011. 3. Survey on Customer Preference of Medical Tourism in India with Special Reference to Kerala State Medical Tourism in India: Progress or Predicament?, Sunita Reddy, Imrana Qadeer, Economic & Political Weekly EPW May 15, 2010 vol xlv no 20 4. Medical Tourism - a Business & Technology Perspective, Radha M De and Diptiman Dasgupta, CSI Communication September 2012. 5. http://www.surgeonabroad.com/information/health-tourismdefinition/ 6. http://wiki.answers.com/q/is_health_tourism_a_boon_or_a_cursegrowth in Medical tourism 7. http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1861919,00.html 6