How to find the best treatment fit for you abroad (part 2)

In this article, we discuss how to best evaluate your choice of doctor for the type of surgery of treatment that you’re looking to get

Doctors: how good are they and are they the ones I should be looking at?

When you’re looking to get treatment in a country different than your own, one of the most important aspects in selecting where to go has to do with the doctors and medical teams that will be carrying out the procedures and providing care to you. However important this step, it is unfortunately not straightforward. As you can imagine, evaluating a doctor’s performance is not easy. And evaluating an entire hospital’s performance and patient outcomes is even less so. There are literally industries built around this very question: is my doctor any good? In this article, we don’t intend to be the definitive guide on how to evaluate a doctor and a health system. But we are able to give useful pointers.

The first instinct for most people when evaluating a medical provider, is to look for user ratings online. In the case of medical providers and doctors, other people who might have gotten treatment from the clinic, doctor or institution will share their experience and give a rating (usually in a scale of 1 to 5, five being the highest). This may be a good place to start your evaluation. However, online ratings by users by themselves will have several caveats to take into account, which you should definitely consider:

Partial information: people rating their experience online will not necessarily share their full story. Their review (whether good or bad), will be lacking a lot of context and important information that could help you understand why they are giving the score and review they’re giving. In the online review world, this translates into happy customers giving generic, not very informative reviews and share what was important to them (for example posting about how they liked the food at the restaurants near the hospital and how nice the building was and not necessarily about the outcome of their treatment), and unhappy customers posting about their negative experience at length. However, in both cases, you will struggle to find reviews that carry information that is valuable and balanced. Unsurprisingly, most of us are not well versed in the type of information that is important in the evaluation of the entire medical profession.

Rating bias: in marketing spaces, it is well known that a happy customer will be happy to share their experience on average with 17 people. An unhappy customer however, will want to share their story with as many people as they possibly can (especially if the subject is emotional for them). People exaggerating, adding too much or too little information and mixing emotions are very common and can distract you from the actual important elements of information. On top of this, people will share their stories. But, as anyone who’s had a class on statistics will tell you, one story and a single data point cannot possibly paint the whole canvas. Given how limited and not very rigorous the online rating system is, you should take these reviews with a grain of salt.

Posting motives and identity: in general, it is very difficult to identify who is posting online and why. The doctors and medical providers may encourage people they’ve treated successfully to post online about their experiences and try to avoid dissatisfied patients to mention them. Shady competitors may try to trash someone’s online reputation or a very dissatisfied person may try to pile on against the people they dislike. Whether they’re positive or negative, it is essential that you consider online reviews of a medical service carefully. These can be useful but should never be the sole basis of a life-altering decision.

After you’ve done a brief examination on user reviews, a very useful tool to evaluate the quality of care is to look for the CV of the doctors and team that will be performing the treatments. The universities and medical schools a doctor’s been to, the fellowships and grants they’ve received, the hospitals and institutions they’re affiliated to, awards they’ve received and general professional trajectory should give a solid understanding of the professional rigor a person has. Although useful, it may also not be the ultimate evaluation tool, especially if a person has done all their training and pursued a prestigious career in a country whose evaluation system you’re unfamiliar with.

When evaluating a hospital or healthcare system, it is of course impossible to determine schools and professional trajectories. However, in this case what you should be looking for are the history of the place (years it was founded, research history, financial and intellectual backers, mission, vision) as well as the types of certification and affiliations the organization has. Are they certified by an international, recognized institution? Are they affiliated with recognizable medical organizations that have themselves proven trustworthy?

The next step in evaluating a medical provider will be the frequency with which they perform the type of surgery you’re looking for. A lot of surgeons will specialize in a specific type of medical condition to treat and will carry out a specific surgery or perform a specific treatment over and over again (almost exclusively in some cases). In general, this is a sign that they know the procedure well and that they’re used to the potential complications it carries and how to avoid them.

Finally, you can look deep into the statistics on the patient outcomes that a hospital and specific doctors have had through the years. This one is trickier for several reasons. The statistics might exist but as a non-expert, you may struggle to understand them fully and may lack a lot of context to understand them (is a 0.03% mortality good? If it is on terminal cancer patients perhaps; it may be less so for sprained ankle patients). This is not to say that you shouldn’t consider this information. But you may want to accept that there is some of it that can be more challenging to understand.

When getting treatment in a different countries, many providers will leave the burden of treatment selection and travel details on you. To make sure that medical tourism and treatment abroad is a good fit for you, you must be well informed as to what you will be getting for treatment, how you will be getting it and what the risks and potential outcomes may be. As discussed previously, there is a lot of information to consider to make sure that you are receiving the standard and quality of care you deserve.