Dr. Allen Nazeri explains how dental practices can attract patients from other countries or regions. Success requires strong systems: fast email responses, call centers, translators, and a dedicated coordinator. Most patients come through trained medical agents and travel agencies who handle screening and medical records.
Chapters
This morning I want to talk to you about how to grow your practice with medical or dental tourism. Now let's look at the definition of what that is. Medical dental tourism is anytime a patient travels from one destination to the other for treatment. Now that can be domestic or international. Examples of domestic tourism is when a patient from some remote areas, villages.
You know, provinces or states, go to a bigger city, possibly for availability of the medical. This is if you have a niche practice, you are a, you know, sub specialist of some kind, and you market to these patients and the patients do not have the services available indoor in their locale. Now international tourism, on the other hand, is when patients travel from one country to the other. Now, despite what people think, it's not always.
Patients going from a high fee country, such as us, Australia, Singapore, Canada, to a low cost country to get their treatment done. Sometimes it's the other way around. You actually see lots of patients, for example, come to United States from countries where the treatment cost is very low, but also the quality level is very low. So they come and seek treatment in other countries. No matter on which side of the scope you are, there are certain things you need to understand and you need to prepare your practices for this type of growth. I help my clients grow through various channels in areas of business development to help them attract more of either international or domestic patients. So the few things that you need to be aware of, number one, you have to have very good systems and processes in place, meaning that you have the ability not only to do excellent external marketing and connecting with the right people or agencies to refer these patients to you, but you have to have very good systems and processes in place in your practice. So you can handle this channel coming in, because a lot of these inquiries will come in typically via email. So what sort of a system and process do you have in place? Do you have a system or process in place where you can return responses to them fairly immediately rather than waiting 48 hours or 72 hours to respond to patients? Do you have.
A good call center available, especially if you're dealing with international patients that they can speak well, they can.
Are proficient in the language of that country? Do you have translators available? Okay, and then finally, do you have a key person that can actually oversee various medical reports, treatment plans, laboratory tests, and communicate this back and forth? So this is an absolute necessary because I, you know, my office gets a call probably once or twice a month regarding can you help us to grow our business through medical dental tourism? And they think it simply for me is to connect Them with, you know, certain groups or certain agencies and so forth and grow their practice. But really what they need to have is they need to have very good systems and processes in place because if you do not have it, guess what happens? You will build a quick reputation that you are not good. And with, you know, online and everything, being so transparent is very, very easy for you to ruin your good reputation on that. So medical tourism and dental tourism is absolutely a growing channel for practices. And there are many countries that are competing with each other. There are many medical shows or many conventions related to medical tourism and dental tourism. Now the other thing you need to remember is that most of the patients that come in, they either come in through a medical agent or some sort of a travel agency that they have become more familiar with coordination of patient treatments. But this should be more than just someone referring patients to you. A good medical agents, they know how to screen patients. They have gone through training, various type of training to learn about how to question patients, how to review their medical history, what sort of, you know, X rays and laboratory tests and medical report tests are needed to provide it to the hospital or the clinic who's going to do the treatment. And they're very knowledgeable and hands on in order to facilitate this type of a transaction. Now these agencies, obviously they expect a fee. They do not do it for free. Just like any travel agents, they do not book a hotel for free. They do not book a patient for free either. Now in some countries in the United States that is obviously illegal because you cannot have, you have the anti kickback laws and you cannot pay for a patient. Now there are ways around it which our office can help you figure out. So still within the law. But the typical standard commission is not.
Readily acceptable like it is in Asia or parts of, you know, Eastern Europe. If this is the first time you're reaching me, this is Dr. Allen. I help develop a scale and exit your practice successfully. If I can help you in any way, please let me know. Please direct message me or visit my website at www.doctoralanzeri.com. thank you very much for following my page.
