Malaga has ambitious plans to become a healthcare destination. Malaga Health, set up by a group of local surgeons, will aim to attract patients to clinics, hospitals and treatment centres on the Costa del Sol.
According to the group, the initiative could help boost Malaga’s tourism industry by €250 million annually in three years, as health tourism becomes increasingly popular. Co-founder Miguel Such explains,” We are sitting on an untapped goldmine and we do not even realise it. None of us are motivated by money. We are embarking on this project to help Malaga. Health tourism is not being fully taken advantage of in Malaga considering the resources we have. The average incoming patient will spend around €10,000.”
Costa del Sol has many private clinics and hospitals. The Malaga Health project is also backed by the University of Malaga, Agencia Idea and Turismo Andalucia. Over 30 hospitals, clinics and other providers have already signed up including Xanit International hospital in Benalmadena, Hospital Parque San Antonio in Malaga, Marbella’s Clinica Ochoa, the Santa Elena Clinic in Torremolinos and several specialist hospitals in Malaga. Participating luxury hotels include the Villa Padierna (Benahavís and Carratraca), Vincci (Marbella) and the El Fuerte chain.
To get the project off the ground the sum of €700,000 has already been raised. Consultants Deloitte have been hired to put together a business plan. As part of its tourism faculty, Malaga University is to create a new department of tourism, health and wellbeing.
Whether it will be called Malaga Health, Costa de Sol Health, the current rather clumsy title of Tourism & Health Spain, or something a bit catchier, is yet to be decided. At launch it expects as many as 20,000 local health and tourism professionals to be involved in the campaign, which is likely to focus on European countries as that is where Spain gets almost all its tourists from.
The region is already well known for health tourism as it has many spas, health centres, Arabic baths and spa hotels.
Xanit International Hospital offers many services and has specialist units for cardiology and oncology. Hospital Parque San Antonio is a general hospital. Clinica Ochoa is a general clinic. Santa Elena Clinic specializes in helping tourists.

The chequered past of Satori Wold Medical’s CEO, Steven Lash, has resulted in the cancellation of Satori’s contract with the US city of Hartford to provide discounted surgery in Puerto Rico for city and board of education employees, before a single employee has gone abroad. In a July press release Satori claimed that Hartford was the first major city in the United States to offer this innovative medical travel benefit to their employees and dependents.
Local newspaper, the Hartford Courant ran a feature on the Satori medical tourism scheme entitled ’City’s New Benefit: ’Medical Tourism’. The columnist, Kevin Rennie, a lawyer and a former Republican state legislator wrote:

“It’s all in the hands of Satori, which won the competitive bid for the Hartford contract. Satori president Steven Lash has a wide array of experience. He was sentenced to 51 months in federal prison in 2004 and ordered to pay $36 million in restitution for his role in a $60 million fraud prosecution involving a physician network management company, according to newspaper reports. This is omitted from his extensive online company profile. After executing a pump and dump stock scheme, Lash will not fear employees’ Connecticut primary care physicians who cavil at patients flying to San Juan for sophisticated treatment”
City spokeswoman Sarah Barr said, ”The city decided to cancel the contract because of fraudulent behavior that was brought to light in lawyer Kevin Rennie’s opinion column. When Satori World Medical Inc. was confronted about Steven Lash’s prior convictions, the city was not satisfied with the answers it received and the contract was terminated."
The city has invoked a 90-day cancellation clause in the contract. There has been no criticism of the hospitals in Puerto Rico.
The contract proposed that Hartford employees could go to Puerto Rico for hip, knee or shoulder replacement surgery, a coronary artery bypass, or other treatment at one of Satori’s network hospitals in Puerto Rico. Satori would provide airfare to Puerto Rico, ground transport, luxury hotel accommodation, and a $250 debit card to individuals willing to seek one of 70 approved operations outside the United States. The medical travel package also included airfare for the patient and a companion and several days of post-hospital rest at a luxury hotel.
The Steven Lash conviction was originally reported by the San Diego Union Tribune in 2004:

“A federal judge sentenced Steven Mark Lash, the former chief financial officer of FPA Medical Management, to 51 months in custody and ordered him to pay restitution of more than $36 million for his role in defrauding shareholders and lenders of the once-high-flying but now-bankrupt company. U.S. District Judge Marilyn Huff in San Diego further ordered Lash to undergo three years of supervised release ……. The jury found that Lash artificially inflated the San Diego company’s earnings and misrepresented that FPA had positive cash flow from operations. Positioned as a middleman between insurance companies and physicians, FPA promised doctors it could simplify practice management by coordinating the payments from multiple health insurers. The company’s revenue rocketed from $18 million in 1994 to more than $1 billion in 1997. Shortly after reporting its eighth consecutive quarter of record earnings in 1998, the company filed for bankruptcy. U.S. Attorney Carol Lam said she hoped the conviction would send a message – "Corporate officers who use their position to commit massive frauds are being held accountable and Steven Lash is no exception."
The San Diego Reader has followed up with a blog post entitled “Local Ex-Medical Fraudster Loses Contract”.
Whether the contract cancellation will affect any other existing or potential business for Satori remains to be seen. Nevertheless, the highlighting of the Satori CEO’s past and the cancellation of the contract will do little to advance the cause of Satori and the medical tourism industry in general.

Stem cell therapy companies in China and Germany, who were criticized by British experts warning of the dangers of stem cell tourism, have defended themselves by saying that their safety records are very good.
British health experts said they are concerned about a growing level of international stem cell tourism where patients travel abroad to private clinics to have treatments that are not licensed by drugs regulators in Europe or the United States. The experts said they were particularly concerned about a firm in Germany called XCell-Center and about Beike Biotech in China, which offers stem cell treatments for a range of conditions including brain injury, cerebral palsy, multiple sclerosis, spinal cord injury and optic nerve damage.
Beike Biotech, China’s leading stem cell research and regenerative medicine company, says that all its stem cells are administered by experienced physicians who work in and for leading hospitals in China, "Beike boasts an impeccable safety record, and it enjoys the support of various branches of the Chinese government and of leading Chinese universities and hospitals. Studies and peer-reviewed papers will show that Beike’s stem cell protocols are both effective and safe. In the West, stem cell treatment is treated like a drug, not a therapy. It requires phase II, III trials before Western doctors and scientists will accept its effectiveness. This has limited the availability and increased the cost of stem cell therapy in the West, causing considerable frustration for many patients who cannot afford to wait until the treatments are proven by Western standards."
Germany based XCell adds that its stem cell preparations are made from bone marrow and intended for autologous use, or use by patients from whom they came, "These preparations are medicinal products for innovative new therapies. They are covered by European regulations on advanced therapy medicinal products and do not require a permit issued by the European Commission to be marketed."
In a new peer-reviewed article published by the Journal of Translational Medicine, scientists from Beike Biotechnology and biotechnology company Medistem, reported positive safety data in 114 patients who were treated by doctors at Shenzhen Nanshan Hospital in Shenzhen using Beike’s proprietary cord blood stem cell transplantation protocol. It describes biochemical, hematological, immunological, and general safety profiles of patients with neurological diseases who were observed from between one month to four years after treatment. No serious treatment-associated adverse effects were observed. Dr. Wanzhang Yang, who led the study commented, "This important study, which is the largest of its kind, demonstrates the safety and efficacy of using cord-blood-derived stem cells to treat a variety of neurological conditions. However, it also suggests cord-blood-derived stem cells are a safe and viable treatment option for a much broader range of diseases and conditions than previously thought."
The British experts led by Professor Peter Coffey of University College London, said they had been prompted to speak out about the risks of traveling abroad for stem cell treatment because of a flood of requests they are receiving from patients who read about apparently dramatic cures on websites and in the media. Clinics in Mexico, Thailand, Germany, Russia and China offer stem cell therapies with high price tags and little clinical evidence to back them up. The International Society for Stem Cell Research has previously warned of private stem cell clinics around the world seeking to exploit desperate patients oblivious to the risks. Several hundred private clinics have sprung up around the world claiming to have turned the dream of stem cell cures into reality. The centres offer treatments for conditions as varied as spinal cord injury, heart failure, Parkinson’s disease, diabetes, autism and eye disorders.
Thousands of patients globally are believed to have had the therapies, which may cost in the region of £20,000 or more. Stem cells are immature cells from embryos, foetuses or adults that have the ability to transform into different kinds of tissue. They hold out the promise of potentially curative treatments for a host of conditions and diseases. However, rigorous testing of the therapies in clinical trials is still in its infancy. Some scientists believe it could be 15 to 20 years before trustworthy treatments are widely available, yet a large number of clinics claim to be offering them already. Currently, there are no stem cell clinics in the UK.
The International Society for Stem Cell Research offers useful advice to anyone thinking of stem cell treatment.

The International Cellular Medicine Society (ICMS), a physician and researcher guided nonprofit organization for the advancement of adult stem therapy, has published its second Off Shore Stem Cell Clinic Survey Report. This study of 22 stem cell clinics in 13 countries is unique in that it is the only survey of the global stem cell market by an independent, medical organization. ICMS represents medical doctors and researchers from over 20 countries on six continents, and published this report as a follow up to the original 2009 survey. The 2010 edition has doubled the number of clinics reviewed and provides a new level of comparative analysis based on how stem cells are processed and implanted by specific clinics.
David Audley of ICMS says, “ Stem cell clinics are everywhere. From Guatemala to Thailand, from Peru to Germany, clinics have responded to increased demand. While exact numbers are hard to verify, it is believed that there are between 100 and 200 clinics offering stem cell therapies. The issue is that clinics in Costa Rica and the Dominican Republic can both claim to treat congestive heart failure, but there has been no way to compare these clinics. As a patient, how are you supposed to make an informed health care decision with little or no information?”
To build a model to compare clinics, patient volunteers for the ICMS contacted over 30 clinics worldwide and inquired about treatments for conditions ranging from congestive heart failure to Parkinson’s disease. The patients asked each of the clinics to furnish information about their treatment procedures. Out of the 30 clinics contacted by patients, 22 provided sufficient data to be analyzed and included in the report.
Dr.Christopher Centeno of ICMS adds, “We recognize that medical tourism is growing, and that transparency about what is going on in these clinics is only way to separate out the wheat from the chaff. The combination of data provides significant insight into the landscape of the global stem cell treatment market to help patients and physicians make more informed healthcare decisions.”
The report seeks to inform patients by providing multiple levels of comparison from cell type (adult versus embryonic) to procedure price to conditions treated. Additionally, the report provides an analysis of clinics based on the complexity of their cell processing and implantation procedures. ICMS plans to publish the report annually as a guide for patients and physicians to compare the treatment options available by stem cell clinics worldwide. ICMS is dedicated to the advancement of safe and effective adult stem cell therapies through research, education and oversight by peers.
The report concludes that the stem cell landscape remains problematic for patients. While new clinics have appeared across the globe to offer treatment, it remains nearly impossible to accurately compare and contrast treatment, much less make an informed decision about which procedure may be best for a patient’s condition. With 22 reporting clinics, 88% of procedures utilize autologous stem cells. There appears to be a growing level of procedural complexity about the method by which stem cells are processed and injected.

Vanity Cosmetic Surgery is the first cosmetic surgery group in the world to accept payment by new currency Bitcoin.
Vanity Cosmetic Surgery is the biggest cosmetic surgery centre group in Florida .It recently announced that it would accept Bitcoin from all their patients to cover up to 100% of the total cost of their services.
Initially discounted as a marketing gimmick, many people have inquired about this new addition and quite a few have already used this currency.
Carlos Yela of Vanity Cosmetic Surgery says,” With this change it will be easier for people to pay with Bitcoin .We want to give our patients all the convenience possible. People will be able to pay with Bitcoin in full for any cosmetic surgery or any other service in our centres for breast implants, rhinoplasty or nose jobs, tummy tuck, liposuction, botox or even a facelift.”
Yela explains why Bitcoin is important,“ It is about globalization, as with the Internet people have access to options they did not have before and Bitcoin helps reduce financial barriers. It offers big savings in currency exchange fees.”
Vanity believes that it is important to go the extra mile to appeal to patients outside their local market, and the implementation of Bitcoin is only part of this in their three clinics in Florida.
The clinics offer a recovery programme “Home Away Vanity”, that includes seven days accommodation and all the necessary transportation, medicines and in-house care from registered nurses in a luxury home with all the amenities a high-end hotel can offer. This approach has been in part the reason for their success attracting foreign patients.

A recent study reveals that the number of Chinese tourists has overtaken the number of Japanese tourists, becoming the number one tourist country visiting South Korea.
In 2013, the number of Chinese tourists increased by 53% on 2012, a total of 4.05 million among the 12 million tourists that visited Korea.
Software development firm 3rdpot has launched a medical recommendation service app targeting these Chinese tourists with the support of the South Korean government.
The launch comes in the heels of a growing number of single visitors for medical tourism. Although group tourism still makes up the majority of the tourists, there are a growing number of young single Chinese tourists visiting Korea for cosmetic procedures.
Unlike group tourists, single Chinese tourists have to take care of their own reservations for flight tickets and accommodation during their medical stay in Korea.
The app simplifies the process of reservation for these single tourists, making it possible for tourists to purchase single deals, compared to package deals, including flight, accommodations, SIM cards and mobile phone rentals.
The app also includes a map service with GPS tracking solution, with location-relevant travel information, allowing people to travel around easily without any guide. The app can be used on all mobile devices and computers.

January has seen more EU countries pass laws and set up national contact points, in line with European Directive 2011/24 on EU cross-border healthcare.
Italy has approved the Legislative Decree, implementing the directive and setting up contacts point for Italian patients considering going to another country and Europeans considering going to Italy .The new law is effective from March 2014 and by then there will be a national contact point and regional contact points in Veneto, Liguria, Trento and Valle d’Aosta.
Spain has passed all the laws needed by Royal Decree and set up a national contact point within the Ministry of Health.
Poland has passed a law and set up a national contact point within the National Health Fund. Polish patients will be able to travel to other EU countries to receive planned medical treatment .The treatment will be refunded by the National Health Fund (NFZ). The government is worried that if thousands of patients who currently have to wait for months to see a specialist head abroad for care, the NFZ budget will be quickly spent .So the Ministry of Health has restrictions to discourage Poles from seeking healthcare abroad including a compulsory foreign treatment referral from a Polish doctor and restricting refunds to only treatments and drugs reimbursed by the NFZ.
Romania has transposed into national law the Directive on cross-border patients’ rights but has not yet set up a national contact point.
Cyprus has passed a law implementing the directive and a national contact point is being set up soon with a new website.
Speaking at a recent seminar, health minister Petros Petrides praised the benefits of implementing the EU directive on cross-border health care, hailing it as truly reformist, “The adoption of the directive will contribute to improving the quality and safety of health care across Europe and ultimately benefit health care systems in EU countries. As a country aspiring to develop a high-quality medical tourism industry, we satisfy all the required criteria, combining a beautiful Mediterranean environment with natural wealth, climate that is ideal for patient treatment and rehabilitation, tradition in healthy nutrition, historical and cultural heritage and internationally renowned medical professionals. Implementing the directive poses a unique opportunity to modernise our healthcare systems.”
At a recent European Patients Federation cross-border healthcare conference Nathalie Chaze from DG SANCO, an organization for patients showed concern that national contact points may not give the right help: “The Directive covers all providers and gives patients the reimbursement as if they were in their own member state. The ideal national contact points should be accessible, accurate, available and customer-friendly. There should be an emergency hotline available to allow for a rapid response as well as information campaigns organised raising awareness about this legislation.”

In an agreement with the Norway Health Authority, UF Proton Therapy Institute in Florida will treat both children and adults who have rare tumors in the nasal and sinus cavity, skull, and brain.
There are no medical centres in Norway that offer proton therapy, and for cancers in highly sensitive areas, proton therapy provides patients a superior treatment that also minimizes risk of damage to vision, hearing and brain function.
UF Proton Therapy Institute has a similar arrangement with the United Kingdom’s National Health Service, which has referred 200 children and adults for proton therapy in Jacksonville, Florida since 2010.
Nancy Mendenhall of UF Proton Therapy Institute explains, “It is significant for both the advancement of proton therapy and our institution to be selected by our colleagues in Norway to care for their patients. It signifies acceptance of proton therapy as the gold standard of care for many kinds of cancer and it recognizes our medical expertise caring for patients who have cancers that in some cases are one in a million.”
Since opening in August 2006, UF Proton Therapy Institute has achieved international recognition for excellence in delivering proton therapy. The pediatric program is the largest proton therapy practice in the world, with an average of 25 children on treatment daily.
Hundreds of people travel great distances to Jacksonville each year to have proton therapy that can give patients the best hope for cure and to go on to live a normal, healthy life.