Mercury Healthcare Intl Uses "Dogfooding" to Test Process and Savings for Medical Tourism

June 20, 2012 - PRLog -- At Microsoft, development staff will tell you that they "test their own dogfood" using their own software before and after shipping to customers.  Maria K Todd, MHA PhD, CEO of Mercury Healthcare International, prefers a classier term to describe how her staff utilizes her company's health travel logistics, healthcare price transparency,  and surgery benefit management services before services are offered to employees of corporate clients. "We taste the food we prepare before we serve it," she says.

"We are a like a living test kitchen," Todd says of her approach to testing health travel network, logistics coordination, customer service, clinical quality, and data integration services.  We allow our corporate clients (domestic and global employers that operate self-insured /self-funded health benefit plans to their employees) to lease access to our network and choose as many high-quality healthcare providers as they like, worldwide, without having to travel to inspect them or negotiate prices and coordinate logistics for health travel without doing it themselves. Through this testing system, fam tours and mystery shopping visits, we take steps toward aligning providers with both external clients and internal business users in the Mercury Healthcare International group of companies.

Two MHI departments have been testing processes and services we offer to employers, Todd says. Employees in HR have been using the network and ancillary services to test engagement, utilization, outcomes and cost savings. Business users in the contracting, healthcare standards committee, and case management department have been mystery shopping, attending familiarization (“fam”) tours and scheduling services using network providers to test their readiness, language fluency, and admissions/discharge coordination processes to receive health travel customers of MHI client employers.

For example, Mercury’s MyHealthSavingsUSA™ healthcare pricing transparency shopping tool has already demonstrated 30x ROI on the low per-employee-per-month service fees for personalized concierge service and 70% employee engagement in a pilot with 140 employees across three states over the last six months.

Over the past six months, our MyHealthTravelBenefits™ program utilization has resulted in more than 10 MHI corporate health travel cases with an average savings of around $15,000 per case, by choosing network providers within our USA network. Another 15 international episodes of care delivered net diagnostic and surgical savings inclusive of travel of around $34,000 per case. In each case, post-service evaluations reported high-first quartile clinical outcomes and patient satisfaction scores for logistics services and direct patient care.

MHI’s Health Travel Network includes more than 15,000 inspected and approved surgical and diagnostic facilities, 850,000 credentialed and privileged primary care and consulting specialist physicians, surgeons, and dentists, and over 65,000 ancillary providers in all 50 states and 95 foreign countries.

Through exclusive contracted travel agency arrangements and its cloud-based health travel logistics platform,  the MyHealthTravelBenefits™ program coordinates all health travel and logistics, medical records, tele-health consultations, continuity of care, and measures clinical outcomes, health status improvement, and client satisfaction, through its trademarked globally integrated health delivery system® infrastructure. Todd and her family have utilized health travel services twelve times over the last few years with savings in the tens of thousands of dollars.

For more information, call MHI at 800.727.4160 (+1.718.802.3225 international).