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1. We are paid a flat fee for our concierge care coordination and other professional services on a per-case basis.
2. We earn small commissions on airline bookings.
3. We are paid fees by advertisers that elect to place a banner ad on our pages that, when clicked, links directly to their website.

Legally, we cannot discriminate against them. However, we make it very clear that these prices are available only to third-party payers who agree to certain terms and conditions for the case rate product.  Basically, they are told in no uncertain terms that: a) pre-authorization is unequivocal guarantee of payment; b) that the bundled price is explicitly described by the provider, without ambiguity; and c) that payment is due in advance or on the day of the procedure and paid directly to the provider offering the cost containment package price surgery product by ACH electronic fund transfer or wired funds to the provider’s specified bank account.

While most employers and union health and welfare that sponsor self-funded benefit plans can arrange for extra-contractual payments to providers and other vendors through their TPA or handle payment internally, most of the traditional managed care plans are unprepared to procure services in this arrangement. Their most frequent response is to stick with the arrangements they have and pay more since, in over 70% of cases, they are not paying the bills from premiums collected. They simply pass on the higher prices to their ASO customers (the self-funded employers and unions who also pay lease fees to them to access the network rates they negotiated) and individuals insured by them. 

Of course! We assess the same flat fee for our professional care coordination and other services to all clients regardless of location or proximity to the provider the select.

You define the episode of care for your offer. Many providers include the initial telephone chat, initial pre-operative consult and the discharge management visit in their package. 

To assist with portability and medical travel considerations, follow-up with the surgeon after the facility discharge is offered by the surgeon as a separate follow-up package or on a fee-for-service basis as the parties may mutually agree. Fees are then paid directly to the surgeon.  In “case rate” bundles, it is not necessary to offer the full 90-day post-operative care and follow-up as a part of the episode of care. Different product. Different rules. Different buyer expectations.

Certainly!  To be able to benefit from the no-interest, no-recourse program we offer, your facility must be accepted by our private lender. Additional details will be supplied upon your request.  Interest-free financing through our private lender is available for patients from USA and Canada. They approve 97% of requests and they will include the cost of travel and accommodation for two people and our care coordination professional fee upon request if you sign up as an approved provider through SurgeryShopper.com.

Absolutely! Dr Maria Todd, is available to consult privately to your facility on an hourly basis. She brings more than 40 years of experience in direct-with-provider contracting for bundled price procedures and medical travel program development. In fact, she wrote the book”s” on the topic that are the best-selling professional books in the industry. She has also helped develop the first and only cloud-based global distribution system for medical tourism marketing and patient care and logistics coordination (U.S. patent pending).

Dr Todd will coach you by phone or via web-based conference or will travel to your location (at your expense) to assess your current situation, train your staff, assist with pricing strategies and procedure selections, and make sure all your quality, safety and customer service considerations have been addressed and implemented before receiving your first patient.

Dr Todd also offers a document set for purchase as a kit that includes all the sample contract, checklist, workflow, and form templates for use with brokers and other benefits professionals, TPAs, employers, unions, and healthcare expense sharing organizations.

Dr Maria Todd is a former OR nurse and an expert in ERISA and third-party liability (MVA / Workers Comp) revenue management and contracting.  Drop her a note or call her to learn more about her qualifications and decide if she’s the right expert to help you.

No problem. When people call to learn more, the lowest priced provider may not be at a destination they want or, they may not be the best candidate for the surgery procedure and the provider may decide against accepting their case. We offer them as many options at as many destinations and treatment settings as they’d like to review. Additionally, the provider may not have openings in their schedule to accommodate the caller’s requested dates. 

Price is not the only driver of patient choice. Location, logistics and transportation, scheduling availability, financing options, surgeon reputation, facility reputation, and other considerations such as overall brand image, online feedback ratings, all contribute to patient selection criteria and assignment of trust. Price is often the thing that sparks the curiosity in the beginning and serves as the final filter on a value proposition that resonates with them.

Obtaining prior authorizations eats up your staff’s time – by some estimates, 14 hours per physician per week.  And often the staff doesn’t know how or what to ask to guarantee payment. Prior authorization is something that our concierge team of experts handles for you. 

Dealing with prior authorization in bundled case rate surgery is something our ERISA specialists have been trained to do. The Federal rules from the US Department of Labor and the IRS that preempt state law when working with self-funded employer groups are very different from the state insurance rules that dictate HMO and PPO pre-authorizations.  We work as your partner and facilitator for the patient to handle this before you commit to accept the case. This reduces the surprise risks for the patient, the employer or labor union and the provider and keeps the program moving smoothly with reasonable expectations. The calls and documentation are all included in the modest flat fee we charge for our professional services.

Yes! In fact that’s an onboarding step we include. You can change them on the fly when you need to, based on medical necessity. But for our concierge care coordinators to be able to ask our client screening questions and answer the client’s questions and help them get their pre-operative testing and records gathered together for transfer, we need to have your standing orders and preferences in our database for each procedure.

Of course. It would be our pleasure. We still charge our modest flat fee for our professional services. That’s a constant. The best way is to charge a case management fee that is included as part of your overhead an bundled into the price you quote. Then, if the patient accepts your offer, notify us and assign the case and we’ll invoice you. You’ll pay us the fee in lieu of having your in-house staff do all work included in our professional fees. 

We’re pleased to share a screenshot of a recent Sunday traffic. 

Sunday July 14, 2019 (screenshot capture: Monday, 7.15.2019)

The image is difficult to view on a mobile device, referrals came from the following sources:

• Google Search: 2491
• Provider.SurgeryShopper.com: 811
• Facebook: 7
• LinkedIn: 4
• Twitter: 1

Surgery pricing pages viewed on Sunday, July 14, 2019, in rank order:

• Hernia: 79
• Knee: 76
• Spine: 58
• Eye: 55
• Hip: 52
• Veins & Arteries: 13
• Upper Arm & Elbow: 13
• Hemic and Lymphatic: 13
• Forearm & Wrist: 12
• Gynecology: 9
• Shoulder: 9
• Cardiovascular: 9
• General Surgery: 8
• Breast Surgery: 7
• Foot & Ankle: 7
• Hand Surgery: 7
• Facial Plastic/Cosmetic: 7
• Weight Loss Surgery: 5
• Gastroenterology: 5
• Body Contouring: 4
• Urology: 3

Average time on page: 1:47
Average pageviews per visitor: 3.83
Bounce rate: 7.67% (Average is 41-55%; above 70% is cause for concern)

Most patients shopping for a surgery procedure don’t have an easy way to find you and your special, transparent, bundled rates.  They would need to go site by site which is boring, confusing and tedious.

For providers who wish to post a banner advertisement of 300px x 300px, we offer a monthly paid banner add with free click through referrals to your website for a flat fee per month.  No lengthy contracts, prepaid, cancel anytime for the following month.

Patients who visit our site will see your ad on the pages you select and if they are interested and click through, they jump from our site to yours. What happens after that is up to them.   We connect our visitors to our approved providers in our database and facilitate appointment scheduling, pre-authorization by their employer/health plan if possible, help them arrange financing, travel, and online or telephone conference calls.  We set you apart from your competitors with SurgeryShopper’s free additional marketing channel to expand your market research with banner ads to help drive more pre-qualified patient traffic to your doorstep.

Yes. The USA is estimated to be the 3rd most popular medical travel destination for surgery. Leading inbound medical visitors come from Latin America, China, and the Middle East. That statistic alone should put your concerns about pricing as a driver to rest.

For example, each year the government of Qatar sends citizens to the USA, UK and Germany. Approximately 4000 cases per year are divided across the three destinations. Average length of stay is often several weeks because they lack the access to specialized care for follow up back home. Average expenditure per case for travel, accommodation and health services is about $240,000 to $260,000.  They tend to use prominent brand-name facilities and providers and their government programs pay 100% of their travel, medical and a per diem for daily accommodation and meal expenses.  Many come with a full family entourage which drives up the per diem cost and travel costs that are reflected in the prices cited above.

Chinese citizens tend to frequent nearby Singapore, but also seek care in many countries in Europe and in the USA.  There are many restrictions for international inbound medical travelers both from the US visa and immigration side but also from the patients’ country and their central bank restrictions on purchasing big ticket expenses from foreign countries. Chinese shoppers are extremely different from a cultural perspective in how they shop, trust, and purchase health services. For one thing, Google is not as popular as Sogou and Baidu. Google is the most used search engine worldwide. Google.cn | Google Hong Kong | Google Taiwan are all subsidiaries of Google. They are the simplified and traditional Chinese versions which help users to search the subject which is not censored by the Great Firewall of China. People in China tend to search in Chinese and refer to medical conditions in their Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) diagnoses. Our team is equipped to translate from TCM to Western Medicine to help these callers sort our requests for surgery in the USA.

If your staff speaks Arabic, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Russian, Herbrew, German or Mandarin, we make language fluency known as part of the basic information we provide, so please keep us updated as often as necessary so we can set proper expectations and provide the greatest competitive advantage for your offers.