An unsettling trend: Texas patients choosing Mexican hospitals

The Fierce Healthcare e-newsletter had a story today about  Texas patients choosing Mexican hospitals. It paints a disturbing picture.

In Texas, [many] affluent patients ... now choose to get their care in Monterrey, Mexico, impressed by the low prices and high-quality care they're finding there.  When they get to Monterrey--or other medical tourism hotspots like Santa Eulalia, Chihuahua and Village de Santiago, near Monterrey--they're finding not only cozy amenities but also welcoming communities.

To capture such patients, two north Texas-based hospital chains, Christus Health of Irving, Tex., and International Hospital Corp. of Dallas run Mexico-based hospitals. Christus Muguerza, a partnership of Christus Health and Monterrey based Muguerza, has identified 40 communities along the Mexican border where it plans to expand.

Here's a real security risk in the making, resulting from the dysfunctional US healthcare system Michael Moore recently hyperbolized in the great yellow journalism film Sicko. Does Mexico have a HIPAA equivalent? Do they enforce it at least as well as we do ours? Who will you go to for redress if your protected health information ends up on the Internet?

Frankly it's very possible the healthcare system in Mexico is better than ours, at least if one is paying for care directly. They may also have a stronger law than HIPAA and be enforcing it more stringently than we do our law. But what does it do to our way-late attempt at a national electronic health record if we have people getting significant portions of their healthcare outside our borders?

We'll see how this goes. I'm not optimistic in the near term.

Comments

[Mike]

I also don't fell this will make any impact in our healthcare system but sure need to watch in near future how this goes.