Medical Tourism: The Critical Role between Taiwan and Mainland China.

Abstract

Recent evidence showed that the International Medical Tourism conference held in Shanghai reported there are 12million outbound medical tourists each year in the whole world, which increased about 15% to 25% per year. Databases were systematically searched between 2010 and 2012 and 60 papers were selected for review. (Fig.1, Fig.2). About 50-60 thousand Chinese go oversea for medical treatment not including the health examination and plastic surgery. Moreover, the target Asia countries are India and Thailand because they provide more cheaper medical services. There are lots of Chinese individuals came to Taiwan searching medical evaluation and therapy about that time. However, due to the political policy changed that the Chinese people are prohibited to come to Taiwan individually, therefore, the medical tourism were marked reduced. In the meantime, China tries to develop inbound and outbound medical tourism themselves and providing more cheaper and quality medical treatment and health examination.