Department of Health Policy and Management, Mailman School of Public Health, Columbia University, New York, USA; Policy Research Group, University of Cambridge, UK.
Faculty of Economics and Business, University of Groningen, the Netherlands.
Health Policy. 2018 Dec;122(12):1372-1376. doi: 10.1016/j.healthpol.2018.09.017. Epub 2018 Oct 3.
Global medical travel has had an increasing trend without a comprehensive, evidence-driven policy to ensure safe and effective practice. To identify key factors that influence medical travel, we conducted a series of studies culminating with a preference and decision-making component of over 500 prospective medical travelers from a number of countries. Results indicated that quality of care was the most critical factor in the decision, followed by lower costs of procedure and shorter waiting times. Lower costs were less of a factor if the procedure was more invasive, which also increased the importance of waiting time in the decision. The most desired destinations for care were in Europe (United Kingdom, Germany) and North America (United States). Building on these insights and previous literature, we present a model that implements applications from these factors and additional insights generated across the series of studies toward an effective policy framework.
全球医疗旅游呈上升趋势，但缺乏全面、以证据为基础的政策来确保安全有效的实践。为了确定影响医疗旅游的关键因素，我们进行了一系列研究，最终对来自多个国家的 500 多名潜在医疗旅行者进行了偏好和决策分析。结果表明，医疗质量是决策的最关键因素，其次是手术费用较低和等待时间较短。如果手术更具侵入性，那么成本较低的因素就不那么重要，这也增加了等待时间在决策中的重要性。最受欢迎的医疗目的地是欧洲（英国、德国）和北美（美国）。基于这些见解和之前的文献，我们提出了一个模型，该模型将这些因素的应用以及整个系列研究中产生的其他见解应用于一个有效的政策框架中。
