Medical-tourists is a patient who buys a medical product or healthcare services online using digital technologies. Medical-tourist travels within a country or overseas, for the purposes of receiving medical treatment/surgery if it is not available and affordable in their place or country of residence. Medical-tourists may also engage in some tourism related activity if health permits.
Published in Chapter:
Digital Health Innovation Enhancing Patient Experience in Medical Travel
Copyright: © 2020
|Pages: 23
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-3274-4.ch002
Abstract
Digital health technological innovations are disrupting every sector of the economy, including medical travel/tourism. Global patients as medical tourists are using patient-centric digital health technologies, enhancing patient/medical tourists experience and making it more transparent and engaging with healthcare providers and medical tourists. Digital communication tools such as e-mail, online appointments, smartphones, instant messaging applications, social media tools, user-generated content by online patient communities, tele-medicine, tele-radiology, my-Health records, Skype consultation, WhatsApp, health video, electronic health records, health data analytics tools, and artificial intelligence-enabled health technologies enhance the medical travel decision-making process, reduce cost, improve patient care and transparency of communication, and engage the relationship between the patient and the healthcare provider with positive outcomes, medical tourist experience, and empowerment.