Malaysia Healthcare Chronicles
Let’s talk about numbers
As we near the end of 2019, we look forward to announcing how many healthcare travellers we have had the honour to serve throughout the year from countries around the world. In 2018 alone, Malaysia hosted nearly 1.2 million unique visitors through a seamless end-to-end healthcare journey experience.
We say ‘unique’ with confidence, as Malaysia Healthcare has in place a stringent and accountable system which enables to report data which are real and transparent.
For this reason and more, Malaysia has been recognised as the Destination of the Year for healthcare travel by International Medical Travel Journal from 2015 – 2017 and received highly-commended mentions in 2018 and 2019.
How does this system work?
Firstly, one needs to understand the differences between the terms: Healthcare Traveller (HT), Health Tourist (HTo) and Foreign Patient (FP).
HT is the umbrella term used to refer to all non-Malaysian citizen who seek medical treatment in Malaysia. HTo refers to those who either travel to Malaysia with the intention of seeking medical treatment or those who happen to be in need of treatment while travelling in Malaysia. FP refers to expatriates, foreign workers, students and other non-Malaysians residing in the country who seek medical treatment here.
Now that we are familiar with the terms, let us move on to the ‘how’. All data on patients from private Malaysian hospitals fall under the purview of the Ministry of Health, which undergoes processing and analysing under the informatics team. The team ensures that issues such as duplication does not crop up, for example, if patient A goes to Hospital X for treatment and then goes to Hospital Y for another, patient A is only accounted as ONE patient.
Once all the data is processed, it comes back to Malaysia Healthcare and we will be able to analyse accordingly how we have been performing as an ideal destination for healthcare.
Over the years, we have been able to see a growing trend of HTo, which simply means more and more people are hearing about Malaysia Healthcare, trusting our services and seeking treatment here! Look out for our upcoming post to learn more about our healthcare travellers!
1 Comment
Dear Sir/Mss., Is it possible to obtain the statistics for medical tourists traveling to Malaysia for healthcare services for the latest 5 years based on the distribution by States in Malaysia. This is because I am going to do a research about medical tourists in Sabah and Sarawak and I need figures to prove that Sabah and Sarawak are lacking in numbers in drawing medical tourists to their States. I hope you can consider. Thank you.