Traveling abroad for medical treatment has now become an accepted and even preferable option. It is now a welcome alternative to spending huge amounts of money to get the required level of treatment or spending inordinate amounts of time waiting for the qualified health care professionals to be available in the patient’s own locality.
As more and more people travel abroad for high quality yet cost-effective medical treatment, here are some related services that have sprung up to add to this rapidly growing field of medical tourism.
Teleradiology – Outsourcing Scans for Interpretation
Teleradiology is one of the newer services that are growing under the umbrella of the broader medical tourism field. One of the main reasons that patients consider traveling abroad for treatment is to beat the delay that is inevitable before the actual treatment. Most patients need to wait for a long time before they are considered for diagnosis and treatment in their hometowns/cities.
Patients suffering from serious illnesses would naturally prefer to get immediate attention so that the disease is brought under control well in time. While it makes sense to travel for surgery or to take care of illnesses that require immediate medical attention, it may be impractical for a patient with a fractured arm to travel abroad to get treated. The fact is, it takes at least 4 days to get a medical report for scanning in the US. Waiting lists postpone medical treatment and even when the initial step of getting a scan report is delayed, the time taken to get to the actual treatment part of the proceedings is no laughing matter. Bearing with any pain that might be present for 4 days could be detrimental to the condition of the patient. The medical tourism industry has come up with an innovative solution to this problem as well.
Nowadays, X-rays and CT scans from the US and UK are outsourced to India. The qualified radiologists in India analyze the image, make a detailed report and send it back. The scans are scrutinized and reports prepared within a few hours instead of the 4 days it would take otherwise. This facility is called teleradiology and many radiologists in Bangalore City offer this service.
Teleradiology started as a service to facilitate emergency scan reporting in the UK and US hospitals in the night when radiologists were not available. But this business is growing as many hospitals realize the benefits that accrue by outsourcing radiology.
Indian radiologists are highly qualified and are readily available 24/7. The cost is also significantly lower - about half the cost for the same service in the US. Billing, Medical Transcription, Payroll and other such services have been outsourced for several years and an increasing percentage of radiology services are also being outsourced.
While offering huge potential to skilled radiologists in India, hospitals and imaging clinics in the US and UK also stand to gain by getting reliable results with a fast turnaround time.
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