iMedical Butler? These guys missed the boat.

Posted by Damjan DeNoble

My “Medical Tourism” Google Alert this morning showed two results with the following title:

Americans Will Soon Have Medical Butlers to Assist in Medical Tourism Research

The famous Deloitte Centre study on medical tourism is cited early on the press release, and so I had somewhat high hopes as I continued reading. The press release, by FlyFreeForHealth.com, did not disappoint, finishing off with a dazzling concluding paragraph, which is reproduced below, and edited for emphasis:

Fly Free For Health is setting up unprecedented medical tourism concierge network  that will consolidate existing medical tourism destinations in Asia to become one medical tourism region with seamless integration of health and lifestyle services. Medical travelers can start the process with iMedical Butler for assisted research and doctor selection and enjoy a high value health and lifestyle convergence during their stay. They can continue to utilize the iMedical Butler service for seamless post-procedure management after they return to their country. For more information, visit www.flyfreeforhealth.com.

So, clicking over to their website, I had quite lofty expectations because anyone claiming to have figured out a way to “consolidate” all existing medical tourism destinations in Asia has got to be a heavy hitter. I expected to see plans for how patients could transfer medical records from their home health care provider to the doctors that will be seeing them abroad; I expected a score of multilingual offerings; I expected some impressive partnerships with the medical tourism industry’s heavy hitters in Singapore, India, Thailand, and South Korea; I expected a few surprises having to do with new insurance players jumping aboard; and I definitely expected marketing aimed at Americans looking for affordable, yet still high quality options for non-elective procedures.
I feel that my expectations were not too high, however.

The press release had, after all, quoted the Deloitte Centre study in which the principal finding was that the medical tourism industry was going to explode because the lagging world economy was going to leave scores of patients in the US and the EU who could once afford home based health care without job provided health insurance, and so these patients were going to look for affordable high quality care abroad. Therefore, based on the claims of the press release, and the implicit guarantee that the folks at FlyFreeForHealth.com had read the Deloitte Centre study, the expectation I had were the barebones of what this service should have been offering.

Unfortunately, as soon as I clicked over, it was obvious from the first page that whoever put this company together missed the mark completely. Instead of a medical records plan I got pictures of smiling, affluent, white people, one of who is bouncing on a trampoline. Also, inexplicably, I was forced to look at a horrid video of a fat, naked man, having his stomach drawn on and massaged by some random doctor – and there was no explanation for the video.

Instead of multilingual offerings, the site was barely able to offer partial language translation- which should always be a red flag – and the languages offered were, again, inexplicably, Malay, Russian, and Vietnamese. I understand the Russian, but Malay and Vietnamese? Finally instead of partnerships with heavy hitters in the medical tourism industry, or insurance fields, they had a “Lifestyle Incentive Partners” page that lists Oosh Diner and Lawry’s the Prime Rib Restaurant as its big corporate partners. I guess the iMedical butler will recommend one of those two for breakfast and the other for dinner.

Worst of all, this company’s concept of medical tourism is limited to elective surgery procedures, completely ignoring the real potential of the market. But, then again, that’s probably all this company knows about the industry. It’s clear to me after reading the site that the press release was probably just pasted together from a couple of Google searches. My gut tells me that these guys are about as likely to be game changers in the medical tourism industry as a four-year-old’s lemonade stand is likely to make a dent in Snapple’s sales of bottled juice drinks.

It’s a shame though, because the press release was catchy.  I wish there were more people out there thinking about medical tourism that actually knew the market, and cared about their patients.