Medical Tourism

In the interview to Sity Suhana Elsa Abdul Majid, Senior Executive Medical Tourism & Business Development of Institut Jantung Negara (IJN), basically IJN is private hospital that is under Ministry Finance of Malaysia. Its objective of existence is medical service to patient, training to doctor and research and development in heart. Just last three years IJN setup their international patient office. This is to promote medical tourism and offer many service to help international patient. In order to market IJN as destination, one of the way IJN do is setup a medical office or in other word representative at overseas. IJN target ASEAN countries because increase in population such as in Indonesia, Cambodia and also Myanmar. Besides that, IJN also promote by Malaysia Healthcare Travel Council (MHTC) to international patient to come to IJN. MHTC is organization that responsible to promote Malaysia health tourism. IJN also do own marketing by mouth to mouth marketing by the international doctor that come to IJN do their training. IJN also offer wide range of services not just cardiologic disease surgery but angiogram and dietician. According to her, roughly around 80-70 Indonesian international patient come to IJN monthly and overall about 150-250 international patient come to IJN.

She also explains that international patient especially Indonesian come to IJN to do Coronary Angiogram. It is a special x-ray of the heart arteries to see if they are narrowed or block. It’s a basic procedure that IJN would do to all patients because IJN would not encourage international patient to do the bypass surgery unless very needed because of the cost of the surgery itself expensive. Next, international patient come to IJN is to doing the heart transplant and also at least to consult the heart specialist consultant in IJN.

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Criteria of the Hospital

In the...