In this interview, Rudy Rupak, co-founder and CEO of PlanetHospital details the vetting process his company goes through to locate the best doctors and put their seal of approval on foreign hospitals listed, by country, at Traveling4Heatlh.

"Finding the right doctor is more important than finding the right hospital," said Rupak, "our company is not hospital centric; it's doctor centric.  A building doesn't cure a person; a doctor does." 

"We focus on hospitals that attract the best doctors," explains Rupak.  "we've visited every single hospital and met with the doctors personally; interviewing them and doing peer reviews and background checks. 

I was frankly surprised, when researching for stats comparing the quality of health care by country, that I found no such statistics at the usual respected sources such as the Kaiser Foundation.

"There really isn't that kind of data available in published form, but we're going to do it ourselves," said Rupak, "It's a legal challenge.  Some of these hospitals have given us data, but it's for internal consumption only and we can only share it with individual patients, but we can't publish it."

"The problem is the hospitals are competing against one another, and they don't want their data to be made public especially to the other hospitals," said Rupak, "They're sensitive about that.   So although we have the data available, we cannot put a comparison sheet together just because of our convenance with each and every hospital."

"We have destination managers located in every single country that we do business in, and one of their main functions is to visit the hospitals and make sure that we get all the data that is germane to the care we're providing.  The data collection is set forth by our Chief Medical Officer and Chief Quality Officer who put together the standards for our data collection," he said.

View the list of hospitals along with contact information and links on the Healthcare abroad section of Traveling4Health.com.