medical tourists

What makes Prince Court Medical Center great?

Posted by Julie Munro on June 14, 2013   |   1 Comment

Prince Court Medical Center, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

PCMC patient room

This Prince Court Medical Center single patient room overlooks a world-famous landmark, the Petronas Twin Towers.

Prince Court Medical Center is MTQUA’s Top Hospital for Medical Tourists for 2013. See all Top 10 World’s Best Hospitals For Medical Tourists.

Prince Court Medical Center provides excellent surgery options for medical travelers. It pays exceptional attention not only to the medical care its doctors and nurses provide but to the details of patient comfort. Its special services include a sophisticated burn unit, and an In Vitro Fertility unit with a multiple fetal monitoring system. Read more…

MTQUA Medical Travel Patient Registry service

Posted by Julie Munro on September 16, 2011   |   Comments Off on MTQUA Medical Travel Patient Registry service

Rest assured of your safety and quality of treatment -and care

Medical Travel Quality Alliance offers this confidential service to medical tourists, their families and loved ones, and their home-based doctors as assurance a patient’s medical treatment and care is proceeding as planned.

Confidential support

The information you provide stays in our private, secure database, to be used only when those you have named ask for our assistance.

Register now.

When you register your intended plans as a medical traveler with the MTQUA Medical Travel Patient Registry, you are not alone on your medical travel journey. If your family, friends and loved ones have any concerns, if your communications with them are broken, if you have any sort of problem, we are there for you. A number to call, a person to speak with, 24 hours a day, seven days a week during your medical travel.

Additional registry services

At your request, we will also provide these and other patient services that you may need.

  • Professional review of the selected hospital
  • Professional review of the selected doctor
  • Professional review of your treatment plan
  • Professional review of your care management plan

These professional reviews will be done by specialty physicians or surgeons, registered nurses or care managers as appropriate in advance of travel. Similar reviews will be done post treatment as needed or requested.

  • Expert review of bills paid to hospital, medical tourism company and/or insurer
  • Notification to embassy or other appropriate legal entity in certain circumstances if required
  • Monitor your treatment progress at your destination to ensure your medical treatment and care is proceeding as planned
  • Advise your family or other contacts of your daily progress

Upon registration with the MTQUA Medical Travel Patient Registry, you will be given contact information for an MTQUA representative accessible at your medical destination 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Medical travel companies, insurers and other medical tourism providers may also register their international patients with the MTQUA Medical Tourist Patient Registry.

Register now for MTQUA Medical Travel Patient Registry.


There is no charge to register.
[contact-form 5 “MTQUA Medical Travel Patient Registry”]

Credit card sized medical records for medical tourists

Posted by Julie Munro on September 7, 2011   |   No Comments

Medical tourists are urged to carry their own records from home to the medical destination to ensure that the correct medical information is at hand at all times. This includes critical personal contact information such as physician phone numbers, lists of medications, recent lab results, cholesterol readings, blood pressure readings as well as the immediately necessary procedure-specific testing and imaging results.

Carry your medical records in your wallet

There are several choices of credit card sized digital solutions for medical travelers to take medical records with them. Able to fit in a pocket, purse or wallet, these cards keep CAT scans, Echo Cardiograms, X-rays, prescriptions and much more in electronic format, able to be seen and used immediately without the need for internet connectivity.

Features of cards like these include

  • the ability to store enormous amounts of current and historical data from X-rays, CT scans, PET scans, ultrasounds, EKGs and pulmonary functioning tests, and more
  • the ability to link with multiple data sources, in-house or external
  • secure immediate record access without an internet hook-up
  • translating medical data into other languages with the click of a button
  • secure backup on cloud servers in case of card loss
  • encrypted database
  • ownership by patient, not doctor or hospital
  • easily updated, with no computer training needed

Getting outstanding medical treatment abroad of the best quality and highest standards

Posted by Julie Munro on September 5, 2011   |   1 Comment

What creates outstanding medical treatment abroad?

When MTQUA representatives review hospitals for our annual list of World’s Best Hospitals for Medical Tourists, these are some of the criteria considered. These are not listed in their order of importance.

1. Medical quality and outcomes

2. International patient communication and care management

3. International patient marketing

4. Value for service

5. Patient safety and security

6. Transparency and disclosure

7. Attention to other unique needs of the medical traveler

8. Website

9. Management

10. Partnerships, alliances and external support

See the Top 10 list of World’s Best Hospitals for Medical Tourists

How to get the best care and best value in medical tourism

Medical tourists have a world of choice in health care and are taking advantage of this. But the information they have to base their choices on is often bewildering, confusing, and wrong.

Patients looking for medical care and treatment abroad need accurate up-to-date and reliable information. Whether a website or a medical tourism company can provide the sort of information that will answer concerns about best quality or high standards of patient safety and care management is often a concern.

Some patients now consider accreditation status and word of mouth recommendations before they make their choice of hospital, and that’s a definite improvement over relying only on the internet for information or choosing the lowest cost.

Issues such as patient safety and security, international patient operations and protocols, marketing integrity, transparency and facilitator review should be weighed heavily in any selection of hospital by the medical traveler.

To get the best value and care from going abroad for treatment to the best hospitals or other hospitals in the best medical destinations, MTQUA recommends that medical tourists consider using a qualified medical travel company or care manager who has professional trained facilitators or agents on site to take care of any circumstances that may arise, medical or otherwise.

Be informed when planning medical travel vacation. Use medical travel care manager to help you understand.

Posted by Julie Munro on August 26, 2011   |   No Comments

Patients, especially medical travelers, should ask for – and receive – information about the hospital where their procedure is to be done. This includes infection rates, success rates for this procedure and with the specific surgeon.

Medical tourists need to know, among other things, who will be the surgeons and what are their backgrounds and experience.

This information is not just hard to get. whether from a hospital or medical tourism company, even if it exists. It’s often difficult to understand, and hard to compare. It’s out of context. Indeed, it’s often useless or meaningless.

Finding medical quality information

Searching out medical quality may be as hard as looking for the needle in a haystack.

One health care expert in America, planning an elective surgery for himself, decided to find out as much as he could about his hospital, his doctor, his costs, and his surgery. His conclusion?

It was impossible to determine, in advance, my likely costs or to obtain truly comparable costs among different providers.

He asked about a lot of patient safety issues – radiation safety procedures such as safety monitoring and likely dose before his CT scan (he got that information but wasn’t sure that even he knew how to interpret it).

He was told the general hospital-specific outcomes for his procedure but was less sure about the comparability of definitions and surveillance techniques.

H was not successful in comparing surgeons’ outcomes, even generally, much less outcomes for specific procedures (and confidence intervals on those estimates).

He did get detailed information about infection control procedures and data… but reluctantly and only after he told them he had run the infections programs for the Center for Disease Control in the U.S.

Good luck in understanding the medical information you get

If patients ask, they can find some information if they work hard at it. But even he — with medical experience and professional background — had trouble figuring out what the information meant.