High-powered delegates: Healthcare and pharmaceutical business players, mostly from Asia, take part in the latest international expo in Taipei.

Earlier this month, Pandaya from The Jakarta Post’s Supplement team of writers attended the 2019 Healthcare+ Expo Taiwan in Taipei and visited Chang Gung Memorial Hospital and National Taiwan University Hospital for a glimpse of the country’s advancements in the healthcare industry on the invitation of Taiwan’s Health and Welfare Ministry and Taiwan External Trade Development Council (TAITRA). He shares his story.

When it comes to medical tourism, Taiwan is arguably less popular among the well-heeled from Indonesia and other Southeast Asian countries. Indonesian patients may still traditionally look to Singapore or Malaysia mainly for proximity, but more and more seem to be taking notice of Taiwan.  

Over the past few years, more Indonesians have come to know about Taiwan’s reputation as a medical tourist destination, where travelers get medical treatment while enjoying pleasure trips. 

The island country lures potential customers with high-tech medical facilities, highly trained doctors and friendly services — all at relatively affordable rates.

With the use of artificial intelligence (AI), Taiwan is set to catch up with other players in Asia that have long enjoyed the booming medical tourism.

To accommodate foreign patients, including those from mainland China who make up the majority of Taiwan’s foreign patients, major hospitals like National Taiwan University Hospital (NTUH) and Chang Gung Memorial Hospital (CGMH) have dedicated medical centers. These facilities help foreign patients with consultations, travel plans, medical visa applications, appointment scheduling, arranging accommodations, billing, transportation and translation.

And medical tourism is growing. The CGMH, for instance, admitted some 35,000 international patients in 2017, about half of whom were from mainland China, 25 percent from Southeast Asia and the rest mostly from the United States, Europe and Japan. Its International Medical Center offers one-on-one assistance and a single point of contact for foreign patients.

The lower prices charged at Taiwanese hospitals attract patients from developed countries. In Taiwan, a cardiac catheterization procedure costs NT$10,000 (US$330.72) on average, much cheaper than $9,000 in the US as mdsave.com indicates.  

Taiwan’s healthcare industry has listed Indonesia as its fifth-biggest customer after mainland China, Malaysia, Vietnam and Myanmar. Its reputation has been spurred by global media’s favorable views about its healthcare system.

The Richest, a foreign finance website, placed Taiwan in its top list of 10 countries with the best medical service system in 2014. Other countries on the list were Switzerland, China, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Cuba. In 2012, the National Geographic Channel released a documentary titled Asia New Vision: Taiwan’s Medical Miracle about Taiwan’s sophisticated medical techniques.

Transplantation

The country’s advanced healthcare system was showcased in the 2019 Healthcare+ Expo Taiwan. The three-day event attracted medical businesspeople from all over the world and featured 1,900 booths at the Nangang International Exhibition Center in Taipei.

With the help of the government, Taiwanese hospitals promoted five services: joint replacements, liver transplants, cardiovascular treatment, plastic surgery and artificial insemination.

Taiwan is well known for its joint replacement and reconstructive surgeries. According to its Health and Welfare Ministry, local hospitals perform some 47,000 joint replacement procedures using minimally invasive techniques every year. To suit Asian people better, materials are made locally.

Technological breakthroughs in transplant technologies have helped catapult Taiwan to the forefront of medical services.

“Patients who had liver transplants in Taiwan have a one-year survival rate of 86 percent and a five-year survival rate 74 percent — the highest rates in the world, ahead of the US, Europe and Japan,” the ministry claims.

Taiwan has been recognized as a pioneer in heart transplants and remembered as the first Asian country that successfully performed the operation. The success rate for stent implantations and treatment of supraventricular tachycardia, a condition that causes your heart rate to speed up, is claimed to be at 99 percent.

The NTUH reports it has performed more than 500 heart transplants since the first operation of its kind in South Africa in 1967, topping Asian hospitals in the number of such surgeries.

Hospitals in Taiwan offer artificial insemination procedures using technology with a promised pregnancy success rate of 36.7 percent and a birth rate of 35.8 percent, making them on par with their counterparts in developed countries like the US.

Taiwan also excels in cancer treatments, wooing prospective patients with official statistics that boast a five-year survival rate of 73 percent, higher than that of its closest competitors, the US and Europe, where the average rate is 67 percent. The five-year survival rate for breast cancer patients is claimed to reach 91 percent, lung cancer at 32 percent, colorectal cancer 68 percent and thyroid cancer 99 percent.

Have issues related to jaw and facial deformities or sleep apnea? Taiwan has craniofacial centers that help correct them through orthognathic surgery.

For medical tourists, the most recommended hospitals are CGMH in Linkou and NTUH in Taipei. Both have departments specifically dealing with international patients who may experience language barriers and come from countries with different healthcare systems.

Reconstructive surgery

Taiwan’s largest healthcare provider accommodating 8.6 million outpatient visits and 370,000 admissions each year, CGMH is well-known for reconstructive surgery, although in fact it integrates treatment across disciplines and has more than 60 treatment centers handling a range of fields, from orthognathic surgery, kidney and liver transplantation to cancer treatment.

Founded by philanthropic brothers Wang Yung-ching and Wang Yung-tsai in 1973, CGMH comprises a network of seven branches scattered throughout Taiwan. It has continued to expand and include Chang Gung University, three smaller health facilities and a nursing home.

The hospital grabbed world attention in 1984 when doctors successfully performed a liver transplant. It made history again in 1997 when it accomplished its first living donor transplant without blood transfusions and has since performed about 2,000 such operations.

Of particular interest are the proton and radiation therapies the hospital pioneers. In the proton therapy center, Chien-Yi Yeh, director of technology and medical physicist department of radiation oncology, showed off a state-of-the-art proton machine.

Briefly speaking, in the robotic treatment the proton is transformed into a high-energy beam that is guided into the patient’s tumor with high precision and the concentrated energy destroys the cancerous cells. The precision means that the radiation does not stray to the normal tissue beyond the tumor, thus minimizing possible side effects.

Ji-Hong Hong, the hospital’s vice superintendant, explained that the precision made proton therapy more effective than conventional chemotherapy. “Patients with cancers of the liver, head and neck, brain, lungs, breasts, pancreas or prostate can have a high recovery rate with minimum side effects,” he said.

Cardiovascular specialist

Founded in 1895 and affiliated with the National Taiwan University College of Medicine, NTUH is Taiwan’s oldest hospital and renowned for cardiovascular treatment. Every year, it treats about 3,400 cardiac catheterization cases.

It has performed more than 400 heart transplants with a claimed success rate of 90 percent. The kidney transplant three-year survival rate is 96 percent. The hospital’s teams perform heart, liver, lung, kidney and bone marrow transplants.

Among its noted achievements is being the first Asian hospital to have successfully performed a cross-matched living donor kidney transplant in 2005 and a robotics-assisted kidney transplant in 2012.

Yih-Sharng Chen of the hospital’s Cardiovascular Center said NTUH aimed to become Asia’s cardiovascular flagship. “We mean to become Asia’s training center,” he said. With more than 1,300 full time physicians, surgeons, attending doctors and medical residents, NTUH is confident about the goal.

Accredited by the Joint Commission International, the hospital treats about 13,000 international patients each year.

Global standards

How can Taiwan manage to raise its medical service, research and education to world standards? According to the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post, major hospitals like CGMH have adopted the physician research system, wherein doctors are paid to spend up to two-thirds of their hospital time to study or pursue research. Doctors have the liberty of concentrating on their fields of expertise and honing their technical skills.

CGMH spends more than NT$4 billion for research and publication of some 2,500 academic articles in international journals a year. In addition, it maintains a large pool of educator physicians to train healthcare professionals across its different departments, the Post says.

As Taiwan continues building its medical reputation, hospitals and the government have pursued a southbound policy seeking collaboration with other health providers in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Thailand, the Philippines and India.

At CGMH, which trains about 200 doctors from other countries every year, there is Alki Andana, a young doctor from Airlangga University, Surabaya, East Java. In Taiwan he studies craniofacial surgery and wants to share his acquired knowledge and skills with his Indonesian fellows once he is back home.

– All photos by JP/Pandaya