COVID-19 Global Crisis- The Ultimate Survival Guide for Medical Tourism

• Pramod Goel
• Jul 20, 2023

With the global pandemic spread of COVID-19 affecting personal and professional lives, it has become crucial to plan effective crisis management. The medical tourism industry is one of the worst-hit sectors as patients are not allowed or afraid to travel abroad for treatment. This has resulted in a pause in medical travel and business events are constantly being canceled.

Planning on how to survive this crisis is the need of the hour. Planning a multi-pronged response, sustaining operations where possible, refocusing on marketing and planning smarter revenue management can be crucial. For this purpose, as a healthcare provider, you have to ascertain what is essential to sustain operations. It could be retaining key staff, controlling expenses or carefully strategizing how to maintain relationships with existing customers along with refocusing on the stability of revenue management and marketing.

Marketing Needs Refocus

In the time of crisis, it is tempting to eliminate or reduce marketing expenses. As it can be instantly turned off, it is always the easiest spend to drop. If you are also thinking to take such action, hold it. The most important thing that keeps your medical center on potential customers’ minds is marketing efforts. So, rather than reducing marketing expenses, you should refocus on the strategies for better allocation of existing budget by adjusting your messaging, offers, pricing and segments. This will keep you updated about when the demand starts to grow again and help you plan the right strategies to let the medical travelers know that you ready with your services.

Keep investing in marketing campaigns that can drive revenue such as paid search, metasearch and remarketing. This will ensure that your medical center in front of potential customers that are still considering traveling abroad for medical purposes once the crisis is over. Well, there may not be customers who will book medical procedures abroad immediately, but they will be aware of your service when the quarantine and travel restrictions will be over.

At the same time, you must align with revenue management for determining the markets of opportunity and markets that are travel-restricted or heavily-affected. Plan short-term promotions excluding these problem markets and target the markets that are less affected or where restrictions can be lifted sooner than the heavily-affected areas.

Position your Brand using Vital Marketing Channels

To position your brand and deliver key messages, you should send messages across important marketing channels. For example, you can inform and educate the prospective customers about hospital facilities, patient feedback or treatment procedures using videos, blogs, and articles. You can distribute these contents in varied channels so that your message reaches the maximum number of people.

Email Campaigns-You can also start creating email campaigns informing consumers about what step you are taking to ensure patients’ health and safety and sanitizing the environment of the medical center. You can also keep them updated about the promotion plans or when you will open bookings once the crisis period is over. Email campaigns can prove to be very useful to empathize and update your target consumers. At the same time, you can also use it to remind them that your medical facility is now open and you are accepting new bookings.

Social Media- Social media is another powerful medium that will help the consumers to stay aware of the updates about your medical center. Social channels can also be used to spread awareness using innovative marketing campaigns.

Survey- You can start a survey on how the potential customers are dealing with novel coronavirus outbreak. Before the restriction being imposed and the cancellations started pouring in, you will probably have the list of potential customers who have shown interest in your medical services. You can create a survey on these potential customers with questions like if they are safe, how are they dealing with the crisis, what are their plans of traveling abroad post the corona restrictions are lifted, are they still interested, if yes, what service or benefits they expect, etc. This will give you a clear idea about the possible list of customers and their expectations. Based on that, you can plan solutions that can excite these potential customers and help you general bookings.

Direct Communication is the Key

To manage any crisis, communication is crucial. The way you communicate defines your ability to manage risk and shape the narrative. At the time when fear and worry have eclipsed the medical travel sector, ensuring ways of direct communication with the patients can show the light. Extend your support to potential customers by letting them reach you directly using innovative technology tools such as Direct Chat, WhatsApp, Artificial Intelligence, Email, SMS, etc. This will help the customers to get direct answers about the treatment queries, safety, and booking plan updates. As the information is conveyed fast and direct, it increases transparency and leads to quick decisions. Direct communication will help you win the trust of potential consumers and increase the possibilities of future bookings.

Pricing Strategy

You may think that lowering treatment prices might help you win new customers. However, you must be careful before doing that. Review and adjust pricing based on what the other players in the marketing are doing. Reducing price seems the easy way out but it does not necessarily generate more occupancy when the demand is limited. Also, if you reduce the rates, recovery will take longer. So, re-evaluate your pricing plans and strike out feasible strategies. You can offer discounts, but maintain standard rates that will prevent your business from suffering loss.

You can also bring innovative offers like free cancellation policy. This will have a more positive impact on the mind of prospects as they will not have fear of losing money even if they need to cancel the bookings.

Online Consultations/ Second Opinion

You can start remote based medical consultation to empower patients with remote online consultation. Many patients, who want to travel abroad but halted their plans due to corona outbreak, may find this online consultation useful. It gives you the flexibility to help patients anywhere and anytime. When patients opt for such online consultations for a certain price, it will supplement your income flow and help you survive the crisis.

Managing your Finance

If you run out of money, you cannot sustain your operations. This is the stage where you can forecast three possible situations, which are slow recovery (more than 6 months), medium recovery (3 to 6 months) and rapid recovery (2 to 3 months). According to each of these demand situations, you have to adjust your forecast and check its impact on your free cash flow. Then start communicating with vendors, asset owners, and others as everyone will be affected due to the crisis. So, beginning these discussions immediately is very important.  

Staff Engagement

It is important to clearly define what is expected from each staff and also listen to their concerns. Be open and transparent about the impact of the crisis on your staff. It might mean a reduction of pay scale of some staff or offering incentives to those who can go a step further to help to survive the crisis.

Everyone is affected by the crisis and this is the unfortunate reality. As your clinic or hospital loses business, your staff will lose hours. However, you should not let go of your best associates as these staff can define your goodwill. Consider some innovative solutions to keep the most important staff working for your medical center as long as possible. One effective solution can be training them on multiple departments apart from their specialties. So, you have to do creative brainstorming to find feasible ways to retain your best staff.

This is an incredibly difficult time, which is unfortunately coupled with plunging revenues and community health concerns. The only way to survive is quickly adjusting to this reality, preparing for the tough path ahead and build flexibility across your actions wherever possible. It is not known when exactly the crisis of coronavirus will come under control and business can resume as usual. What we all know that this will pass and we have to survive the crisis.

In such a testing time, PlacidWay is with you. Our innovative technology and strong relationships can help you get over the crisis. As the leading global medical tourism marketplace, we bring visionary solutions including technology integrations and effective marketing strategies supporting direct patient-provider communication. Together we can create ground-breaking strategies to deal with the COVID-19 global crisis.

 

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