Globalization Of Health Care Essay

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Week 1: The Globalization of Health Care 1. What are the facilitating developments that have allowed health care to start globalizing? As the telecommunications developing, the doctors and the patients in different places of the world can talk about the state of an illness freely. Plus the Internet and World Wide Web allow the hospitals in the USA to send the medical diagnostic images such as CT scans and MRI scans to India, where they could be read and interpreted by sufficient doctors. In addition, modern transportation technologies such as commercial jet aircraft could allow the patients fly to another country to take a surgery with reducing time than before. 2. Who benefits from the globalization of health care? Who are the losers?…show more content…
Are there any risks associated with the globalization of health care? Can these risks be mitigated? How? Comparing to the local medical treatment, I consider the potential risks would be the accuracy of the treatment and inconvenience of the follow-up treatments. Some patients also might be attracted by some foreign hospitals' extremely cheap price of surgeries. However, if these hospitals are not authorized or qualified by the US government or some other professional institutions, the safeties or qualities of the surgeries could not be guaranteed. Actually some penitents might take risks to do the surgery abroad due to price advantage. If there are some quality issues of the surgeries, it is difficult to claim, because some patients are not insured and hospitals are overseas which would waste time on negotiation. Moreover, for the long-distance MRI scans reading and interpretation, the radiologists lack the firsthand contacts with the patients, which might influence the accuracy of diagnostic results only via the images. I also think abroad surgery is not suitable for those patients who suffer from the chronic diseases and only one time surgery cannot cure it completely. Frequently flying abroad to take surgeries would be exhausted and cost much money in transport. And it is also inconvenient for the long-term further consultations or return
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