Medical TourismAttracting International Patients for 17 Years: What Has Changed, and What Hasn't
Key points
- The value of brokering that merely connected patients with hospitals has declined. The search bar now makes that connection for free.
- Trust is still hard. More information did not make believing any easier.
- If the value of brokering information is fading, the answer is to move away from selling information and toward selling trust.
- In 2009 and today, the essence of this work comes down to one thing. Putting a stranger at ease so they can cross a border.
Between the day I started this work 17 years ago and now, what has changed about bringing a single international patient to Korea?
Almost everything has changed. And the most important thing has not changed at all.
In 2009, I stepped into the work of attracting international patients. Since then, this market has grown beyond recognition. The number of international patients coming to Korea bears no comparison to back then. The tools, routes, and competitive landscape have all changed. But when you do this work long enough, you start to see ground that does not budge beneath the surface changes. Telling apart what has passed and what has stayed — that is how you prepare for the next 17 years.
What changed
Three things changed.
Information became common. Information used to be power. Which hospital was good at what, and how much it cost — whoever held that knowledge moved patients. Now patients search first. Before they come, they have already compared, read reviews, and gotten a feel for prices. The information asymmetry has collapsed.
Hospitals go direct. Hospitals once left the work of attracting patients to others. Now they have their own coordinators, open their own channels, and find patients themselves. The place in the middle has been getting narrower and narrower.
The value of an “introduction” has declined. Put the first two together, and there is only one conclusion. The value of brokering that merely connected patients with hospitals has declined. The search bar now makes that connection for free. The fee that introductions alone used to earn is shrinking every year.
Information went up, and the value of brokering went down. But the difficulty of earning trust did not budge.
If you look only this far, the old way seems to be fading. It really is fading. But what is fading is the way of doing it, not the work itself.
What stayed the same
Three things have not changed, either.
Trust is still hard. More information did not make believing any easier. If anything, the opposite is true. The more information overflows, the harder it is to know what to believe. The fatigue of telling an ad from a review, and the real from the made-up, has grown. The flood of information has not quenched the thirst for trust.
Language and distance have not changed. Screens have erased borders, but the body still has to cross them. Patients still have to fly thousands of kilometers to a country where they do not speak the language. They need an interpreter, they get lost in an unfamiliar city, and when something goes wrong, they have no idea where to turn. That physical fact has not moved an inch in 17 years.
When the procedure ends, they go home. Even a patient you worked hard to bring here often gets one procedure, goes back to their home country, and that is the end of it. Repeat visits remain uncertain, and care after they return home is still a blind spot. Earning lasting value from a single patient was an unsolved problem then, and it still is now.
but it could not increase the quality of trust.
Once you clear away the illusion
There is one illusion here that has fooled us for a long time. It is the belief that when tools get better, the problem gets solved too.
What technology changed is the quantity of touchpoints. There are more routes to reach patients. But reaching people and building trust are two different things. Even if your channels grow to ten, nothing happens if the person on the other side of them cannot get past “Can I trust this hospital?” With every new tool, the problem of trust only moves somewhere else; it does not disappear.
Here is the paradox. The more common information has become, the more precious the work of picking out what is truly worth trusting has become. What becomes common loses value, and what becomes rare gains value. What is fading is connection, and what is rising is trust.
So where to place the bet
Chase what changes and you will always fall behind. The race to keep up with new channels, new tools, and new trends has no finish line. A business that lasts is built on what does not change.
If the value of brokering information is fading, the answer is to move away from selling information and toward selling trust. If connection has become free, the answer is to build the reassurance that comes after connection. Laying out prices honestly, painting an unfamiliar process before the patient’s eyes, taking responsibility until after the patient has gone home — that is the place whose value has not dropped once in 17 years.
The place that does not change
The world will keep changing. New tools will come out again, and the face of competition will change again. The past 17 years have already answered what to hold on to each time.
In 2009 and today, the essence of this work comes down to one thing. Putting a stranger at ease so they can cross a border. The way to last in a changing world is not to chase the new faster than anyone, but to stay more firmly rooted in what does not change than anyone else.
