AMONG the excited shopaholics and selfie-takers among China’s outbound travelers is another group — more serious and usually carrying their medical records.

    They are going for medical treatment abroad and many are traveling for a last chance at life.

    Xue Lingling is one of the lucky ones.

    When Xue’s face began swelling up, she visited numerous doctors in different hospitals before a reputed hospital in Shanghai finally diagnosed her condition as non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Her immediate and constant question was: how long will I live?

    The answers were ambiguous and pessimistic. Doctors in China told her that she might have to undergo an operation that had a low success rate and would scar her face.

    She refused to accept this and decided to go to the United States for treatment.

    In December 2014, Xue traveled to the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, Massachusetts. After a high-precision biopsy, she was told that there were several types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma and that treatment for the type she was suffering from had a higher success rate because the cancer cells were slow growing.

    Xue underwent precision chemotherapy and the doctor said the possibility of a relapse in the next 10 years was less than 10 percent.

    Xue was assisted in finding treatment by Saint Lucia Consulting. Its services included translating her medical records, making an appointment with the hospital, and providing companionship and language assistance during the treatment.

    Established in 2011, Saint Lucia is one of China’s largest consultancies for cross-border medical services which claims to has contractual long-term partnerships with dozens of the world’s best hospitals in the United States, Germany, Britain and other countries.

    Saint Lucia Consulting received only two cases in its first year, but now helps more than 500 Chinese get medical treatment abroad each year. CEO and founder Cai Qiang says the growth rate is beyond his expectations.

    “Traveling abroad, studying overseas and even immigration are now common for Chinese, but when it comes to seeking medical treatment abroad, they are not convinced. Health care is very technical for ordinary people, and even wealthy patients are unaware of the option of seeking treatment abroad,” Cai says.

    As China becomes more affluent and has more contact with the outside world, more people like Xue are heading abroad for better medical treatment.

    The Wuzhou Hospital Management Co., based in Hangzhou, arranges treatments for clients in the United States, Japan, Germany, Britain and Denmark. Fan Yuexin, the company’s founder, said clients went overseas for superior medical technology and services.

    One area of high demand has been among cancer patients. According to the National Cancer Prevention and Research Center in Beijing, the five-year survival rate of Chinese patients is 30 percent, half that of patients in the United States.

    This had been a boon to agents who introduced mainland patients to foreign hospitals and clinics, said Wang Gang, president of the Hope Noah Co. in Beijing.

    The company’s business has grown by half annually in the past few years, and in April they signed contracts with nearly 60 new clients.

    The company charges 98,000 yuan (US$15,433) for its first week of service, which includes booking appointments with overseas hospitals, translating medical records, applying for visas, arranging airport pickups, providing accommodation and accompanying patients. They charge 30,000 yuan per week thereafter.

    Most of Hope Noah’s clients are seeking treatment for serious conditions such as cancer or heart disease. But other patients were heading offshore for advanced pharmaceuticals that were still a decade away from approval for sale in China due to government red tape, Fan said.

    “A lot of my clients with hepatitis C go to the United States to get orally administered drugs that are believed to offer a 90 percent chance of a cure. Chinese doctors still rely on the traditional method involving interferons [which have multiple side-effects],” he said.

    Other drawcards were a more “humane” level of service and tailored medical treatments, in contrast to China’s cramped hospitals and overworked medical staff.

    Xue was impressed by the thoughtful and careful treatment. During her chemotherapy, the doctor detailed the unexpected side-effects and asked her to express her feelings freely. In contrast, when she was doing a magnetic resonance imaging scan in a hospital in China, she was “fixed on the bed with fear.” The doctor told her to be motionless, without giving any explanation.

    “I was very surprised that the U.S. doctor answered my questions with great patience. If that happened in China, the doctor would have a long queue outside the door,” Xue says.

    Fan said competition within the sector was fierce, with dozens of newcomers emerging in recent years, especially fuelled by capital markets that sensed the growth potential of the industry.

    Sequoia Capital, a leading international venture equity firm, last year put 10 million yuan into Saint Lucia Consulting, the China Business News reported.

    Compared with the dynamic growth of Hope Noah, Fan’s company had grown more slowly with only three or four new clients a month since it was set up at the end of 2013, Fan said.

    Shanghai-based Ryavo Healthcare had a similarly sluggish start, according to its general manager Zhou Jizhao, who said the public response was cooler than he expected when he opened the agency two years ago.

    That could be because people are still largely unaware that much better medical services can be accessed overseas.

    The three agencies claim they all partner with top hospitals in the United States and Japan, such as Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and Tokyo’s Cancer Institute Hospital of JFCR.

    Mass General had about 100 Chinese patients last year, 10 times as many as in 2011, the Boston Globe quoted Dr. Andrew Warshaw, former chief of surgery who heads international and regional clinical relations for the hospital, as saying.

    Nearly all Chinese patients paid their own overseas medical expenses because commercial international medical insurance had scant coverage in China, the three agencies said.

    But the industry is not without risk. CCTV reported that a domestic agency charged one Shandong patient with eye problems 600,000 yuan for translating his medical records and contacting an American hospital. The agency later told him to remit 10 million yuan for “treatment bills,” saying the hospital said the illness could be completely cured. The man realized it was a con and didn’t pay the second installment.

    In regular practices, agencies don’t charge medical costs and patients pay their bills directly to the overseas hospitals.

    Dr. Yu Wenbing, from the Beijing Cancer Hospital, said it was good that wealthy patients sought overseas treatment because it would help reduce the workload for doctors at China’s top hospitals.

    It is estimated that 700,000 people from outside Beijing flock to hospitals in the capital every day, according to the news portal Cnr.cn.

    “I should point out that China’s first-class hospitals have close communication with elite health centers abroad and the capacity gap [between China and the world] is narrowing,” Yu said. “In terms of surgery skills, Chinese doctors are a cut above foreign counterparts because they practice a lot.”

    Huang Ruofan, an oncologist at Shanghai’s Huashan Hospital, agreed, saying the only value of overseas medical care was to receive treatment from the best doctors acknowledged globally in the industry.

    “I doubt agencies know who those first-ranked doctors are and I don’t think they can access those leading experts,” he said.

    (SD-Agencies)