KUALA LUMPUR, May 28 (Bernama) -- Malaysia has bright prospects in medical tourism, driven by its highly trained doctors, excellent facilities and competitive currency, said IHH Healthcare Bhd.
Its chief executive officer Dr Prem Kumar Nair said Malaysian hospitals have received patients from various countries such as the United Kingdom, Turkiye and Australia to perform surgeries due to cheaper prices and unavailability of medical experts in their home countries.
Taking advantage of that, he said, the newly acquired Island Hospital in Penang will become their learning ground to improve the growth in medical tourism.
"For now, our medical tourism percentage has risen from five to seven per cent.
"Once we fully integrate Island Hospital, the overall percentage of our revenue in Malaysia will be at 14 per cent, coming from medical tourism," he told a press conference after IHH’s 15th annual general meeting here today.
On the other hand, Prem said the company will study the implementation of the diagnosis-related group (DRG) system as it is difficult to enforce at private hospitals for now.
He said the DRG system was originally invented to fund mainly public healthcare systems and it is very prevalent for the National Healthcare Services (NHS) in the UK and Europe or National Health Insurance (NHI) in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
"According to the system, public or a private hospital are paid by a single payer, and for ease of processing, every procedure has a code such as appendicectomy, cholecystectomy, open heart surgery, and paid at a fixed rate," he said.
Prem said there had been much discussion on the DRG implementation, whereby the Ministry of Health (MOH) has engaged with IHH, insurance companies and consumer groups, and it was concluded that it was very difficult to implement the system in private hospitals.
"There is a pilot system going on in some MOH hospitals now, and I think it does make sense to do it (implement DRG) in the public sector.
"There is a certain standardisation of rooms, facilities, amenities and all that... MOH has explicitly said we will not have it, but it (DRG implementation) has clearly been deferred for the time being," he said.
IHH has presented a strong financial performance in FY2024, with double-digit growth in key metrics, backed by strong operational performance across key markets.
It said in a statement that the group continued to deliver resilient growth and healthy returns for shareholders as it executes its five strategic growth priorities.
Correspondingly, IHH had declared a final cash dividend of 5.5 sen per share, bringing the total ordinary dividend for FY2024 to 10 sen a share, up from nine sen per share for FY2023.
-- BERNAMA
