Discussion Topic: Medical Tourism & International Healthcare Accreditation
Medical tourism and international health accreditation will inevitably always be linked together for a variety or reasons. Medical tourism is most definitely a growing business (see the Discussion page dealing with medical tourism and legals risks), and represents a multi-million dollar industry.
Some countries are working very hard to develop their own medical tourism industries, including Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, India, the Philippines, Costa Rica and many Eastern European countries, and in many cases medical tourism is an increasingly important factor in their economies. There is now a growing number of international conferences devoted to medical tourism, and these invariably involve some time devoted to international healthcare accreditation - some of these are listed on the "Conferences around the world" page.
You can learn a great deal more about medical tourism and the interactions with accreditation by checking out non-aligned web pages such as "Med Trip Info" ( http://www.medtripinfo.com/ ), "Health Business Blog" ( http://www.healthbusinessblog.com/ ), "Treatment Abroad" ( http://www.treatmentabroad.net/ ), the "Medical Tourism" entry on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medical_tourism) and the "International Healthcare Accreditation" entry on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_healthcare_accreditation).
Because of the growing importance of medical tourism and the potential risk to patients, to healthcare staff and to hospitals, SOFIHA has great interest in this area.