Recently, People's Daily Online published an article titled "Industry Focus on Overseas Medical Care: Cultivating Reputable Service Providers is Key." The article stated, “Due to the uneven qualifications and chaotic conditions among many medical tourism industry players, fraud continues to occur. Cases of patients being scammed while seeking overseas medical treatment happen ‘repeatedly,’ causing varying degrees of financial, physical, and psychological harm to many. Therefore, the medical tourism industry must cultivate reliable service providers. Unlike sightseeing tourism, the core of medical tourism lies in the word ‘medical.’ Thus, when choosing a service provider, one must be rigorous and evaluate from four aspects: qualifications, services, personnel, and costs.”
After the publication of this article by People's Daily Online, it received widespread praise and sharing within the medical tourism industry. Indeed, in today’s society, more and more people are traveling abroad for medical treatment, and there are countless overseas medical consulting agencies in China, both legitimate and illegitimate. As People's Daily Online pointed out, these agencies vary greatly in quality, and finding a professional and rigorous service provider among them is very difficult. Whether it’s intermediaries, agencies, or the emerging self-service and direct-operation models, it is hard for consumers to accurately distinguish between them.
Why does the market need professional medical tourism service agencies?
In my opinion, choosing strength means choosing professionalism. Professionalism is a form of self-respect and fairness to others. Take medical care as an example: visiting a community clinic doesn’t require a registration fee, but going to a top-tier hospital does. So why do so many people still choose to go to top-tier hospitals? Moreover, top-tier hospitals have different levels of doctors, such as attending physicians and chief physicians. Undoubtedly, chief physicians possess greater professional expertise and clinical experience than attending physicians, which also makes them more trustworthy to patients. Professional medical tourism service agencies in the market are akin to chief physicians at top-tier hospitals—they can provide clients with high-quality medical assistance and professional services from a professional perspective.
Does the market not need agencies that only offer local reception?
Professional medical tourism service agencies can help avoid being “scammed” when seeking overseas medical treatment. First, professional service agencies will not “resell” clients to local reception providers, because they have their own professional service teams. Taking us at Tai Oriental as an example, our team includes:
1. Medical consultants: Certified by the National Reproductive Health Consultant qualification, our medical consultants can provide clients with professional fertility consultations, assisted reproductive consultations, and prenatal and postnatal care advice to meet clients’ reproductive needs.
2. A professional medical translation team with 2 to 3 years of experience: These translators are permanently assigned to specific hospitals. Compared to the transient translators at other agencies, these medical translators are intimately familiar with hospital procedures, communicate more smoothly with hospitals and doctors, and most importantly, have more specialized experience with various IVF-related medical conditions.
3. A professional medical expert team: Doctors from top-tier hospitals evaluate clients’ physical conditions online. Do you need IVF? Are you suitable for IVF? What is the success rate of IVF? And so on. Additionally, they will develop scientific conditioning plans based on the patient’s health status to improve IVF success rates. They also provide related medical support such as pregnancy and postpartum medical guidance after embryo transfer.
4. Professional services: A dedicated overseas reception team provides attentive services throughout the IVF process, covering food, clothing, housing, and transportation.
Currently, most agencies on the market still focus primarily on signing up clients, sending them abroad to earn hospital commissions and service fees, regardless of whether the medical treatment is successful—in layman’s terms, they are focused on making quick money. In contrast, professional service agencies focus on providing professional medical solutions and charge fees for these solutions. To this end, they have implemented a series of measures to increase client success rates. This helps clients avoid financial, physical, and psychological harm caused by unprofessional intermediaries. Therefore, when seeking overseas medical treatment, it is essential to choose a professional service agency.