United States Small Employers: A New Marketing Channel for Medical Tourism?

As a strategy for lowering healthcare costs some large United States employers are beginning to offer a medical tourism benefit to encourage patients to seek care abroad. Using a pilot survey of 20 small employers in August of 2018 this study estimates a baseline understanding of whether they would be a viable channel to “push” medical tourism utilization within their employee population and encourage more patients to seek care outside of their home country. Given the small sample size, this work should be seen as early findings to inform a future larger scale study.