Last week, Steven Lash, President and CEO of Satori World Medical, spoke with HealthBlawg, an industry blog focusing on issues related to law and healthcare, last week about Satori’s take on medical tourism, including its method of sharing cost savings with consumers who use Satori’s services through employer-sponsored health plans.

David Harlow writes:

Sharing cost savings with employees through Health Reimbursement Accounts — funded through tax-deductible contributions by the employer if an employee uses an overseas medical service, and are used to pay for an employee’s health insurance premiums, deductibles and copayments in future years — is one of the Satori innovations.  Lash distinguishes his offering from that of the Hannaford’s-Aetna medical tourism plan which was announced with great fanfare, led to no employee taking advantage of an overseas procedure, and brought out a domestic provider that offered to match the overseas pricing Hannaford’s had obtained.  He also presents a number of other aspects of his company’s program in our conversation, including patient intake, patient choice, and quality assurance through selective contracting with JCI-accredited overseas providers for a limited set of services.

There are wildly varying estimates of the numbers of medical tourists originating in the U.S. — 50,000 to 750,000 a year, depending on who you ask and how you count — but that number seems likely to go up before it goes down.

You can read the blog and hear HealthBlawg’s audio Podcast interview with Lash here.

Download the audio here

Stay tuned for next week’s Satori World Medical blog post on international medical quality.