Speaker 1: Hi, guys. Gillian Elliott here with another educational video about medical tourism. Today, I want to answer a legal question that I got about medical tourism. It was actually sent to me on Instagram. So, you guys can reach out to me on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and all my social media and send me questions. I'll be more than happy to answer those. And also like, share, and subscribe to this video. But this question came from Instagram. It was a comment that I got in regards to legal matters and medical tourism. So, I want to read the comment to you guys, then I'm going to give you guys my perspective and what I've seen work best for medical tourism facilitators. So, the email starts off, Hi, Gill. I'm still looking for U.S. business insurance for my medical tourism company to protect my business from any possible lawsuits. Any ideas? So, when it comes to legal matters and medical tourism, I've seen people handle this a few different ways. So, I'm going to give you my perspective on the best way I've seen it handled, and that's through medical tourism contracts. So, you want to start off, before you work with a patient, what I would suggest is that you send that patient a medical history form. This form is going to collect all the information that you need to know before you take this person on as a client. It's going to get their medical history. It's going to ask them if they had any previous surgeries, any current medication they're on. It's really going to give you a detailed health profile of this person. So, you can even find out if you want to work with this person, maybe they're high risk, maybe they need a physical examination before the medical trip, but you need to find out all this information before you set up a trip for them and before you take them on as a client. This is just to protect your company from risk. So, that's the first thing I would do to help you as far as mitigating your risk as far as medical tourism is concerned. The second thing, and I jotted down some notes here, the second thing you want to do on here is have a contract between yourself, the facilitator, and then the healthcare provider that'll be doing the procedure. And the reason why you want to do this is because in your contract with the healthcare provider, you could spell out different things that you expect when you send patients to them. For instance, you only want your patients that you send to this healthcare provider, you only want them working with a certain quality of doctor, right? Only the high standard doctors. You want somebody who speaks the patient's native language when they get to the hospital. These are key things that make sure not only that your patient has a better experience, but also if they're experiencing any discomfort or they want to express something in regards to the procedure, they can feel like they're being heard out. So, you want to make sure that you're mitigating your risk that way. And then also, just a little bit more on this contract as well between the facilitator and the healthcare provider. This contract is also going to go over the fees that you're going to be paid. It's going to go over when the fees will be issued to you, when you'll get your commission. So, it spells out a lot of different things. So, you definitely want to have a strong contract between yourself and the overseas healthcare provider. Like I said, this isn't a short contract. It goes over multiple things. It goes over the fees you'll be paid for your services. It goes over what type of healthcare provider you want working with your patients. It goes over what you expect from this hospital, which also helps you with your risk as well. And the next contract that you can use to mitigate your risk in regards to medical tourism and coordinating patients is a patient waiver agreement. So, this patient waiver agreement is really important as far as mitigating your risk because it's the patient acknowledging that they understand the aspects of medical tourism. They understand the risk associated with it as well as the benefits. And they also are saying that they take full responsibility for their health in regards to traveling overseas and getting a procedure done. This patient waiver agreement also prevents you from getting sued down the road. A patient goes home 30 days, 60 days, and then trying to come back to sue you. This agreement addresses that situation. Now, I'm not saying that they can't do it, but this agreement is going to address that and going to help you as far as avoiding that situation. So, the next subject I want to touch on is governing law. You want to make sure you put a clause in your agreement that goes over governing law. And what governing law is, it just means that if a dispute or a lawsuit does arise, what country will the agreement be interpreted in? Will it be interpreted in your country or will it be interpreted in the patient's country? Now, obviously, you want this interpreted in your country. So, I get asked this a lot because we have template contracts that are fill-in-the-blank contracts that you can use. They were made for medical tourism facilitators. And so, people reach out. And when they ask about our contracts, they'll say, well, how's it going to be interpreted? What country is it written for? Our contracts address governing law. And when it talks about the country that the contracts will be interpreted in, it leaves that blank for you to fill in your country. So, governing law is something that you can't leave out of your contracts because if a lawsuit does take place, you definitely want to make sure that you are in the best position possible. Obviously, we hope that you never have to go through any of this, but it's always good to be proactive at the beginning by putting governing law in your contracts. And the last point I want to go over is complication insurance. You should be providing complication insurance or offering complication insurance to all of your clients. Now, whether they accept it or reject it, that's up to them, but you definitely want to provide it to them as an option. And if they do reject it, you want to spell out in your contract that it was provided and they rejected it. That way, if something does come up, you're covered under that end. And in your medical tourism contract, you also need to address what happens if a complication does take place. Who's responsible for that? So, these are different things you want to put in your contracts. You want to make sure that the client definitely understands how medical tourism works, what the risk and benefits are, and that they agree to accept the risk and benefits of this medical tourism trip, and then go from there. So, offering the client complication insurance is definitely a proactive thing that you want to do just in case something happens that's unexpected on this medical trip. It's already addressed in your agreement. So, in my opinion, the best way to protect your company from lawsuits is making sure you have all the necessary medical tourism agreements in place, and making sure they're signed by your clients. Hey guys, thanks for watching this short video today. I want to let you know I'm not a lawyer, but all the information that I provided to you guys today did come from our legal contracts, which were composed by lawyers who specialize in medical tourism and global healthcare. So, if you're interested in getting these contracts that we provide, I'm going to leave some links below. They can also be accessed through our membership program, and if you don't need all the benefits that we provide through our membership program, we do have packages that just offer these legal agreements. So, thanks a lot again for watching.