If this blog entry seems a little late, you're right. We had technical issues with our blog database late last week, and we haven't been able to post any entries since early Thursday morning. I'm told those tech issues have been resolved, so I wanted to jump in and post this blog entry I wrote last week. Enjoy!

My latest "Bill of Health" report is actually a follow-up story to a piece I did on the same subject - medical tourism - two years ago. At the time, in 2006, medical tourism was just starting to be recognized as a real trend. Now, in 2008, that trend so established that we're starting to see large companies like Intercontinental Hotel Group (IHG), Aetna and New England's Hannaford Brothers supermarket chain embrace the idea of medical tourism in their own ways.

For IHG, the idea is to seek some profits from medical tourists who may venture to foreign hospitals such as the Johns Hopkins-affiliated Punta Pacifica facility in San Jose, Costa Rica, by selling those travelers hotel rooms and other services. And some insurors are recognizing a fertile marketplace of small and large companies which want to provide decent healthcare plans for employees, but find healthcare insurance costs inordinately high. Aetna and Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina have started tailoring their plans to allow these companies to give their employees the opportunity to head to India and elsewhere in quest of knee and hip surgeries and other expensive procedures.

Some concerns about medical tourism are also being addressed by the marketplace, such as the question of post-operative care. Who takes care of patients when they return home to the United States? Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina, through its wholly-owned subsidiary, Companion Healthcare Group, now has an in-state network of physicians who will care for a patient who's gone overseas for medical care.

Finally, state legislatures and even the American Medical Association are starting to recognize the medical tourism trend. In 2007, state lawmakers in Colorado and West Virginia introduced bills that would require insurors for state employees to cover medical procedures in overseas hospitals. And the AMA recently issued its first-ever guidelines on foreign medical travel, which insurors and others involved in medical tourism say they will be following closely as the industry grows from a cottage industry into a much larger enterprise.