Reframing US Healthcare Globalization: From Medical Tourism to Multi-Mode Cross-Border Trade

This Perspective presents a framework for US hospitals treating foreign patients to reconceptualize international healthcare trade by leveraging all four modes of trade in health services under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), which include information exchange (Mode 1), patient travel/medical tourism (Mode 2), commercial presence (Mode 3), and temporary movement of healthcare personnel (Mode 4). This framework illustrates how hospitals could adopt multi-modal approaches and describes the strategic implications for hospitals and their international patient programs. Historically, US hospitals have focused primarily on international patient travel (Mode 2), but this narrow approach creates vulnerability to disruption. Mode 2 exports by US hospitals have not recovered to pre-pandemic levels, making expansion into other modes essential for maintaining competitive advantages while mitigating systemic risks. Diversification into other modes, such as digital health and telemedicine (Mode 1), co-branding and managing facilities (Mode 3) and visiting professorships (Mode 4) are single-mode approaches for diversification. Multi-country clinical trials are an example of cross-border trade that addresses all four modes of GATS. Overall, this perspective provides a new framework for US providers engaged in or considering entry into international markets that does not solely rely on Mode 2 medical tourism but instead adopts a multi-modal, cross-border health service paradigm.