So Long San Francisco

The 2008 World Medical Tourism and Global Health Congress was held on September 9-12th in San Francisco California. It was a tremendous success with over 850 attendees from over 45 countries and more than 53 exhibitors and sponsors!

The conference featured advanced workshops in the areas of marketing, Building International patient departments, legal issues, quality of care, medical tourism facilitator hot topics, and more! Some of the panel session highlights were the Employer panel session where participants from Black & Decker, Procter & Gamble and Hannaford Brothers discussed their feelings on medical tourism. Another exciting panel session was the Insurance company panel session consisting of participants from Swiss Re, United Healthcare, CIGNA, and Assurant Health discussing both the negatives and positives of medical tourism and the insurance company view of medical tourism. A significant number of media and press came to the event with outlets such as MSNBC, Human Resources Executive Magazine, Business Insurance, and San Francisco Chronicle just to name a few.
The Highlights of the event included over 3,000 one-on-one Networking meetings with unlimited networking opportunities throughout the event, leading to many contracts signed between insurance companies, hospitals, and facilitators. New contracts were also signed between facilitators and hospitals or clinics. The conference featured many advanced educational sessions, including for the first time ever the ADA, AMA and ASPS who spoke about medical tourism. The exhibit hall came alive with all of the many countries that were represented through tourism boards, hospitals, facilitators, and many more who exhibited their quality of care and healthcare available to medical tourists and their world class services.