The Multibillion-Dollar Medical Tourism Hub In The Heart Of Texas

[Music] foreign American medical tourism might sound like a trip to Mexico for a bbo or Costa

Rica for rhinoplasty well America has its own corner of the medical tourism Market which in 2021 was valued at 4 billion dollars and is expected to

increase substantially over the next few years so much so that between 2022 and 2030 America's medical tourism sector is projected to increase nearly 33 percent

and the money doesn't just come in from treatments alone foreign patients need to consider additional costs that include airfare housing food Outpatient

Care exchange rates and more all which funnel into the operating systems economy one of America's most popular cities for medical tourists Houston Texas Houston is an international

Healthcare destination for patients looking to undergo a variety of procedures ranging from cosmetic to life-saving Cancer Care and is home to one of the largest medical districts in the world

went to Texas to understand how medical tourism impacts the city's economy with help from in-state experts who know the system inside and out including Dr vaquis founder and director of the

center for medical tourism research medical tourism is basically Health seeking behaviors that go beyond traditional boundaries and borders this

could be people that are traveling outside of their city county or even state or potentially even outside the country to get access to care that they

want at the price they want at the time they want at the location they want and at the Quality they want medical tourism the nomenclature of medical tourism is

an interesting term but it turns out it's very appropriate the reason I say that is that when people are traveling

for Health Care particularly over a border whether that's a domestic or an international border they tend to engage in tourism so for example here in

Houston the Texas Medical Center is the largest Medical Center in the world receives a lot of international patients from all over the world primarily places

like Asia Latin America and the Middle East and when people come to Houston they engage in tourism our studies find

that about 70 percent of the medical tourists as we like to call them that come in for various types of care will

also engage in some tourism in terms of going to a local festival or concert my path into medical tourism and researching medical tourism is that when

I dropped out of Industry I was a hospital executive for one of the largest publicly traded Hospital chains in in the world and I came over to

Academia there was really nobody else studying medical tourism at the time they had a focus on it and so I was really interested in it because the the

whole idea of patient consumerization people taking control and responsibility for their health care and then going out and finding the health care that they

want and in fact being able to find Alternatives from the traditional models of Health Care that they were being offered in the United States and around

the world was very intriguing to me I started reporting on medical tourism because of that story back in I think it was March of those four Americans who

went down to the uh to Mexico and they were kidnapped in very two of them were murdered and so they went down because one of them wanted a tummy tuck and you know my journalist brain was going off like why are we going to Mexico first

let me tell when you know there's doctors here in the U.S

um and so that's kind of how I found out about medical tourism I think medical tourism is getting popular is just for a couple reasons for one it's the cost Effectiveness

um a lot of people travel down to different countries like Mexico um because procedures there can sometimes be less expensive than they are here in the states and then of

course there is less restrictions in certain countries so some doctors here in the states might tell someone oh you know you're too old or your BMI may be too high for a certain procedure but a

doctor a foreign doctor might you know take them and be able to perform the procedure and then um especially with the overturning of

bro here recently in a lot of states or making abortions illegal um a lot of people are traveling outside of the country to get procedures like

abortions done in countries where they're still legal cosmetic surgeries interestingly make up only about 13 percent of the total surgeries that we find that people are

traveling for so it's it's far less than overall all the surgeries General surgeries about 30 percent and much less than Dental which is probably about 50

pharmaceutical we don't have a good understanding of that but here recently with the supply of Olympic being restrained in the United States there

was a study that showed among Canadian pharmacies that about 10 percent of their total their total prescriptions for Olympic were going to American

citizens really depends on the type of people they're traveling their needs and also the again the core competence that exist in that specific location

interestingly Americans have an interesting view in regards to International health care and that they tend to be fairly provincial and they

tend to not believe that there's good health care outside of the United States compared to what's here in the United States and in some cases there may be some truth to that but there are many

places around the world that are providing extraordinarily good care usually at lower prices than not only what a cash price would be in the United

States but in some cases the price is lower than what you would pay for your deductible meaning though even though you're insured whether you have a health

care product from the exchange or private insurance you may be paying thousands of dollars out of pocket for your deductible and it's actually cost less than that to get a procedure

internationally and so when you combine that with a trip you may actually end up with a vacation and health care for much less than you would expect

people coming inbound foreign patients International patients coming into the United States are tend to be affluent it's actually really interesting just

because you wouldn't think that you know this city in Texas especially because I'm from Texas I had no clue um that you know this is where a lot of foreigners were coming to get procedures

done Houston has a world-class medical center Houston is known for two things one of them is energy and oil and gas and the other is health care and so Houston has

the largest Medical Center on Earth uh it is a massive accumulation of very specialized facilities it's called the Texas Medical Center

[Music] one of the things that Houston is doing in particular is the integration the Houston and the Texas Medical Center

which is the largest Medical Center on the face of the Earth has a cluster approach in layman's terms the Texas map centers a very defined piece of geography and within that piece of

geography are massive hospitals you know Texas Methodist Hospital Memorial Hermann Hospital and so the hospitals and practices that are there in the grounds of the Texas Medical Center

proper are part of this bigger Hospital systems and they use What's called the international patient advisory Council to get together a variety of

organizations from throughout Houston including the Chambers of Commerce the airports the local city county state and

federal government the restaurants the hotels the hospitals they all get together and what they do is they coordinate and talk about things for

example Transportation if you're an Arab patient coming into Houston you're going to want to know that not only can you come here and be safe and secure and you

have a good place to stay for you and your entourage but you also need to know that you're going to be able to access halal food a lot of procedures require

patients to stay in close proximity to their hospitals like this kind of an extreme example but like the people on my 600 pound life for example they

oftentimes travel to Houston to get their procedures done their my gastric sleeve or gastric bypass and so they have to stay close to their hospitals or

even stay in the hospitals um to get that you know the the post-op work done and so sometimes they have to like literally uplift their families so that they can come stay with them for

you know months or weeks or however long it takes and so that's one reason and then other procedures like bbls for example um and other cosmetic procedures like the first

week or even a couple days can be a little brutal in terms of recovery especially with like you know lymphatic drains and they have to like sleep or even sit a certain way and so I can

imagine that going through that recovery phase is can be much more beneficial or even convenient in a place like a house or an apartment

um rather than like a hotel for example especially because you have to pay for a hotel by the night whereas a rental you can you know oftentimes pay like by uh by the week or by the month

[Music] I'm Michelle Kneeland with corporate Retreats International and we're based out of Houston Texas we're a corporate

housing company but we specialize in furnished apartments in the Texas Medical Center area people seeking medical treatment find us a number of ways Word of Mouth maybe from a friend

who came here Joe's house is a resource that we get a lot of calls from it's a website and or a list

that's a resource for specifically people seeking cancer treatment so it offers a number of housing options for people who are receiving cancer treatment

we also get calls people are referred by the different hospitals by the social workers or agencies at the hospitals they they'll get a list of of housing options and people also just drive

around and look for something that they like they'll walk into a Lobby and they'll be referred to us that way as well I would say it's on average between

20 and 30 percent at any given time of our residents are here from outside the U.S

U.S and they they travel here usually with a lot of family members so it's more common that they would be looking for a two or three bedroom apartment than a

one bedroom but we see people from all over the world typically see that travel great distances to come see us are people that

have usually had a failed surgery somewhere else and these people are in in Desperate shape uh so desperate that they'll travel you know thousands and thousands of miles to try to find the

right uh practice or doctor or both to help them some of the simple things that it's just easy to overlook so for instance if somebody has a big revision spine surgery and they need home health

well Home Health won't respond to a hotel right so to hook them into the services that they're likely to need where you can put them into more of a home situation with a physical address

so that they can receive that care that they're going to need after a big complicated surgery I would say in the 80 to 85 percent range of our of our Rev

and come from people who are here for medical treatment of some kind and probably in the 25 range would be International and that of course changes

all the time because we have people move in and move out every single day so it's it's in flux some people stay with us for six weeks two months six months a

year so that those International numbers kind of change all the time but that's probably a pretty pretty accurate representation of our of our clientele

in places like Houston we typically have international patients that will come in they spend a very large amount of money

typically about 10 times as much as what a tourist would pay in Houston so in other words a normal tourist coming to

Houston doing most types of tourism activities they would spend say in the nature of maybe three four thousand dollars at the

most probably in the hundreds of dollars is more average and for medical tourism the total amount could be tens of thousands of dollars at least thousands

potentially tens of thousands of dollars so the the uh the economic impact of foreign tourists coming into a place like Houston is tremendous

about six hundred thousand visitors in Houston came from foreign countries in 2022 alone and out of that six hundred thousand over twenty thousand of them came for medical purposes and the

average amount of money being spent by patients in Houston is thirty four hundred dollars and that's not including things like Hotel travel food and other miscellaneous costs that's just strictly focusing on inpatient and Outpatient

Care so interestingly what we've seen around the world is an increase in affluence many people have heard about in the business literature the idea of the

brics which was Brazil Russia India China those have expanded greatly to include many countries that are seeing increases in affluence meaning that they're the people that are in those

countries have more money than ever before one of the first things that people do when they have more money and also interestingly one of the things that most immigrants are traveling for

is they're looking for better education for their children so therefore you see like educational tourism as it's sometimes called if you go to most

top-tier business schools around the world you're going to find that a very large percentage of them are from overseas and the reason they travel into the country is to get access to better

education another thing that people do as soon as they have more money is they they want to travel and they want to eat better and so we see that in terms of

the tourism aspects and then the fourth if you will leg of the stool or the chair is health care when people get more money one of the first things they want to do is they want to have better

health for themselves and their family so International tourists coming to the US for medical tourism they're more like affluent and they have

more money and more resources to travel for um medical purposes especially after the covid-19 pandemic [Music]

the pandemic made basically the entire world sicker the the more people are sick more people are ill more people have put off health

care for too long for years during the pandemic there's estimates that upwards of 40 percent of Americans alone gained

on an average of about 15 pounds during the pandemic there's estimates that 10 percent of British people put off

seeking Cancer Care during the pandemic all of these issues are leading to the world being a much sicker Place Plus many people were sedentary and sat

around and watched Netflix way too much and snacked on food while during the pandemic all of this has led to people needing more Health Care and More

invasive and higher Acuity levels of Health Care the American Medical Association is saying that just in the U.S hall hospitals alone just domestic

U.S hall hospitals alone just domestic patients are seeing overall bills about 10 percent higher than they were before the pandemic not due to inflation but

due to the Acuity or this their level of sickness when they they present so more people are presenting with stage two cancer when they should have presented with stage one if they had engaged in

primary care and preventative Services obviously during the pandemic I think that our recent experience with the coronavirus pandemic has really really puts International Health Care on its

ear obviously there's been a tremendous amount of regulations and rules about travel visas and this and that historically Houston is a natural place

for international patients to come not only because of our Medical Center and just our expertise in healthcare in general but also geographically Central America South America we see a lot of

people from the Middle East because of our ties with oil and gas and so we see a large number of patients within our practice every year we have Departments

of individuals that are that are geared towards helping those people with some of the unique challenges that they face as they seek Health Care yeah I mean most of it is just logistical um you know the the care of the

international patient is challenging for a lot of reasons as a surgeon the biggest reason that that I come into grips with is the support system for the person and so for instance if I was to

operate on you and you were from Houston the surrounding area that once we got done with you and we were to send you home you'd have the support of your family and all those types of things and so our biggest emphasis on caring for

international folks is understanding the fact that they don't have that support system around there and and people with very simple problems uh rarely travel a thousand or more miles to get that

simple problem carried for and so our entire focus is that of of just helping the individual with some type of support structure so people when they first call us are

usually extremely under a lot of stress sometimes I just found out they have this diagnosis or their family member does and they're going to be traveling

from across the world or across the country some long distance they've not been to Houston maybe and they they really have no idea that this is all

very stressful and very unknown um so what's really amazing is when I do get the chance to tour someone or even just really get to narrow down what they want

even over the phone and help them find what's a good fit you can just hear relief in their voice see it on their face it's such an important thing for

people to say Okay I I know where I'm going to stay when I'm here and I like that at least I know I'm going to be going through a really tough time and I don't know what that's going to look like for me but at least I'm going to be

in a comfortable place where I'm going to feel safe where I can relax and rest and recover it is really tough because it's not like we what we do is just just lease

Apartments just rent apartments to people I mean it's very personal um you know people call you crying there's there's really good stories of really

good success stories a lot of Happy Endings and then there's there's some really tough things that happen as well so it's hard because we aren't like a

non-profit we're running a business but we have to have empathy for all of our customers thank you I'll give you some evidence to show how

big medical tourism is into the United States back in the Obama Administration I think

it was the end of those first term they decided to give a grant for establishing

a group it's called you Skip and it's a group of the best what most well-known academic medical centers in the United States so that they could get together

and promote themselves and promote Health Care in the United States so it was identified again under the Obama Administration as being one of the

up-and-coming revenue streams for the United States in terms of how large it is just here in

Houston alone we know it's hundreds of millions of dollars so across the United States there is estimates to say that

potentially with all the people coming in and all the locations it it may potentially reach upwards of a billion dollars in total revenue coming from

foreign patients now there's some distinctions in that is that all Health Care Revenue probably not that probably includes both flights hotels

Transportation food tourism there's a variety of aspects that go into medical tourism but overall we know that it's a

significant driver of Revenue in several places throughout the United States so this is leading to again unhealthy populations greater

utilization put off health care for a long time it's kind of like a if you will a perfect storm for medical tourism and so locations like Houston which

already see a large number of foreign Nationals it's going to be a boom for them and don't forget we're also seeing increasing population growth in places

like Latin America one of the number one locations for foreign Nationals coming into Houston we're seeing population growth in places like Asia which was

sending a lot of medical tourists into the United States prior to the pandemic so there's there's a lot of if you will

upward pressures or upward opportunities for medical tourism to grow and my belief is it's going to grow

at at least a double digit rate going forward historically both in to and out of the United States we've seen about 10

15 percent growth rates I expect that to continue in the near future [Music]