Meeting the needs of international patients

Continuing a long-held tradition

At the start of World War I, the American community of Paris organised convoys of private cars to collect those injured at the front line and transport them to a small nonfor-profit hospital in Paris run by American doctors. Soon, several field hospitals in nearby public buildings were set up to support the war effort.The American Hospital of Paris became what it is today – a multi-specialty hospital of the highest international standards, driven by innovation and treating patients from around the world, regardless of their origin, nationality, colour, religion or sexual orientation.

Today, over 30 per cent of all patients at the American Hospital of Paris are international patients. In 2020, in the midst of the global Covid-19 crisis, the AHP once again conveyed hundreds of patients in critical states to Paris, this time not by car, but by air ambulance. This ongoing effort, seven days a week, enabled international partners to offer some sort of lifeline to their patients in the most remote areas in the world, crossing mostly closed borders in order to save lives. Thus, AHP’s Medevac Unit was born. Since its introduction, three intensive care beds have always been kept available for complex international medevac cases.

Key services provided by the medevac unit are:

• International emergency hotline available 24/7/365
• Three dedicated ICU beds for international medevac cases
• Dedicated international medical coordinator
• Contracts signed with more than 50 insurance partners with preferential pricing
• ACLS-trained bilingual ICU nursing staff
• State-of-the-art ICU department
• Translators available on call.

This unit, steered by an experienced team of Operational Assistance Professionals, has one mission: To provide partners from around the world with a simple answer within hours about patient admission: ‘Go’ or ‘No go’.

Medical Talent project

While hospitals around the world were struggling to absorb Covid-19 cases in-house, all other types of surgeries were cancelled en masse. Some patients that initially had treatable pathologies quickly turned into severe cases, and healthcare systems were overloaded. The situation was especially tricky for the thousands of international patients who were supposed to reach AHP from around the world for their surgeries. They were left stranded, behind closed borders and with little to no options locally.

Realising that the travel-for-treatment model is not only vulnerable to external factors but unsustainable on an environmental level, AHP decided to change the tide by launching its Medical Talent project.

Medical Talent involves sending surgeons from AHP to partner hospitals abroad in order to screen, treat and operate on patients with their local colleagues, transferring their knowledge and infusing it into the local healthcare system.

Since its launch in December 2021, Medical Talent has sent urology, gastroenterology, cardiology, and interventional radiology surgeons to share their know how with their colleagues.

Urologist Professor Aurel Messas described it succinctly during his first mission: “It’s smarter to send one surgeon abroad to treat 50 patients than make 50 patients travel abroad to get treated by one surgeon.”

We couldn’t agree more. This is the future of healthcare, and it is possible today thanks to technology and innovation.