Today I want to go over how much it costs to start a medical tourism company. This subject matter was inspired by an email I recently got, so I will read the email and outline the main costs when starting a medical tourism company.
Some of these costs are reoccurring; that’s why I added them to the list. At the end of the blog, I’ll go over how you can get these costs down and how I can help you.
The email starts, “Dear Gilliam, I’m seriously thinking about opening a medical tourism company. My question is, what is the right budget required to start the business. I also need your advice on a marketing plan for at least six months. By the way, do you have templates for a marketing plan?”
So, that was the brief email that he sent. I’m going to address his email, and if you have a similar question, hopefully, this will answer it for you and give you an idea of how much it will cost you to launch the business and get started.
Marketing Strategies in Healthcare Tourism
The first thing I’ll go over since he raised it in his email is marketing strategies in healthcare tourism. Marketing is going to be one of the most significant expenses when starting a medical tourism company. In fact, it’s one of the reasons why companies go out of business. They don’t have a sustainable health tourism marketing strategy, or they only have a temporary marketing plan. Marketing expenses last the duration of your business, so once you launch your medical tourism company, you want to factor in your marketing costs on a monthly and annual basis.
We have a detailed marketing plan template that you can utilize to lay out how you will get your brand in front of your target customers. It’s going to go over your agency’s S.W.O.T Analysis meaning the strength, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to your startup. It covers things like what marketing channels you’re going to use to attract prospective clients, and you’ll have access to this through our membership program.
After you complete the marketing plan, you’re going to have a realistic idea of how much it’s going to take you to operate and market your company. With that being said, marketing can cost anywhere from a thousand to several thousand dollars a month. It depends on how big you want to grow your agency and how rapidly you want to grow it. If you want a small agency, it could cost you around a thousand dollars or less per month. However, if you’re more ambitious and want to grow a big agency, it’s going to take you more marketing dollars to get in front of more prospective clients and generate more patient leads.
Medical Tourism Website Design
The next expense I want to go over is your medical tourism website design. You can either have a custom-designed website or a template medical tourism website. If you choose a custom site, the design and theme will be uniquely made for your company and built from scratch. As you can imagine, it’s a bigger investment to create a site from scratch, but there are many benefits. People like websites that are customized for them because they rank better and faster on Google’s search engine, and it’s an overall better experience because the design is unique to their company and not shared with any other company.
With a template website, there are also benefits, one being you can get online quickly. Typically, it takes several weeks to build a customized website but only a week or days to complete a template website because it’s already pre-made, you have to add the content, logo, and domain name, and you’re ready to go.
Medical Tourism Education
The expenditure I want to go over next is medical tourism education. When it comes to medical tourism education, you have a couple of options. One option is to fly to a conference and get certified at a medical tourism summit. That’s going to be the more expensive route because you’ll have to fly to the event and a lot of times they charge more for the training. Another choice you have is taking a health tourism online course. This option is usually the most cost-effective and can be done from the comfort of your home, at your own pace.
Whichever option you choose, you want to take some form of medical tourism education and training before launching your medical tourism company. Patients love to see the certification logo on your website, promotional material, and social media platforms because it shows that a third party has verified you.
Medical tourism training courses also show you how to make the most profitable and successful agency possible.
Building Your Healthcare Provider Network
You can build your healthcare provider network in a couple of ways. The most popular way is to fly to your potential partners’ medical facilities and meet with their staff. Physically flying to the destinations will allow you to walk around each hospital and clinic and understand how they operate. The second option you have is doing 100% of the vetting and research online and virtually meet your potential healthcare partners (i.e., setting up virtual meetings with doctors and their staff) and find out if they’re a good match for your company via the internet.
Flying to the medical facilities to meet your potential healthcare partners face to face is usually the best choice, even though it’s more costly.
Medical Tourism Legal Issues
The last topic I want to cover is medical tourism legal issues. You should never coordinate a medical trip for a patient until you have a solid medical tourism contract in place.
I added this one to the list because I’ve seen health tourism agents spend thousands of dollars on composing a single contract for their company.
When it comes to creating legal agreements for your company, you can hire a lawyer, although there’s not a lot of lawyers that know what medical tourism is. There are a limited number of lawyers who specialize in global healthcare, which is why they are typically more costly to hire. The most affordable option is to obtain pre-made contracts for your medical tourism company. These are contracts that are ready-made for medical tourism facilitators.
If you’re looking to cut down on your startup expenses, reach out to us. Our Facilitator Gold Membership offers all of the resources and tools discussed in this blog.
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