Destination Markets in Medical Tourism

Destination markets in medical tourism are the countries that receive patients. The destination side is better documented than the origin side, because a hospital sees everyone it treats, but better is relative: the strongest national series examined for this site records how many patients arrived and how much they spent, and nothing else.

What a good national series looks like

Turkey’s state international health services company publishes a health tourism series sourced to the national statistical institute. It records 756,926 patients in 2019, 1,381,807 in 2022, 1,538,643 in 2023, 1,506,442 in 2024 and 1,398,580 in 2025, with revenue of about 1.46 billion United States dollars in 2019 rising to about 3.02 billion in 2025.^[1]

That is a genuine official series, published by a state body, attributed to a statistical authority, with annual reference years. It is better than almost anything else available in this field. And it consists entirely of two columns: patients and money.

There is no breakdown by procedure, no surgical and non-surgical split, and no country-of-origin detail on the page consulted. The consequence is specific and important: every circulating figure for the number of a given procedure performed on foreign patients in that country has no official statistical basis, because the official statistics are not collected in a form that could produce one. That is a documented absence rather than a failure to find the data.

The category is also wider than medical travel as this site defines it. Health tourism patients, in that series, is not the same population as people who crossed a border in order to obtain a specific treatment.

Destination data inside a measured system

The European Commission’s collection records destinations for publicly funded cross-border care. For 2020 the leading destinations were Germany, Czechia, Spain and the United Kingdom.^[2] Read alongside the finding that cross-border healthcare concerns mostly neighbouring countries, that list describes regional movement rather than a global market, and it covers only care sought under one instrument.

Why destination figures cannot be compared

Three obstacles stand in the way of a league table, and all three are documented.

The unit differs. One country may publish arrivals, another visits, another episodes of care, and none of these is a count of people unless a patient identifier links the records. The United States national inpatient dataset states that it contains discharge-level records rather than patient-level records, and that no uniform patient identifier is available to allow patient-level analysis.^[3]

The population differs. Some series count every foreign national treated, which includes residents who happen to hold another passport, while others attempt to isolate people who travelled. A commissioned review found that one firm’s markedly lower estimates arose from deliberately excluding dental patients and expatriates, and that the spread between published counts is attributable in large part to different definitions.^[4]

And the recording practice differs. The European statistical office states that comparability across member states is limited by the way in which national data is available, with some countries unable to cover all providers and private hospitals noted as particularly difficult.^[5]

A ranking of destinations assembled from such series would be comparing arrivals against episodes against residents, for different years, collected to different standards. No such ranking appears on this site.

See also

• Source markets in medical tourism, the origin side
• Medical tourism rankings, and why these series cannot support one
• Medical travellers and resident foreign patients, the population problem
• Inbound medical tourism, the same phenomenon seen from the destination

References

1. USHAS, Turkish state international health services company. Health Tourism Data. Page states the source as the Turkish Statistical Institute. Verified against primary record: official body republishing official statistics, opened and read. Retrieved 30 September 2026.
2. Olsson J, De Smedt L, De Wispelaere F. Data on patient mobility under Directive 2011/24/EU: Trend report, reference years 2018 to 2020. European Commission, December 2021. Verified against primary record: official data collection opened and read. Retrieved 2 October 2026.
3. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Healthcare Cost and Utilization Project. Introduction to the HCUP National Inpatient Sample, 2021. Verified against primary record: dataset documentation opened and read. Retrieved 2 October 2026.
4. Lunt N, Smith R, Exworthy M, Green ST, Horsfall D, Mannion R. Medical Tourism: Treatments, Markets and Health System Implications: A scoping review. 2011, commissioned by the OECD Directorate for Employment, Labour and Social Affairs. Verified against primary record: officially commissioned review opened and read. Retrieved 2 October 2026.
5. Eurostat. Health care activities: reference metadata. Verified against primary record: statistical metadata opened and read. Retrieved 2 October 2026.

Sourcing note: the Commission collection, the dataset documentation, the review and the statistical metadata were opened and read on 2 October 2026; the Turkish series was opened for earlier work on this site and is dated accordingly. The absence of any procedure breakdown in the Turkish series is reported as a finding rather than as a search failure, and no procedure-level figure for any destination appears in this entry. No ranking of destinations is given, and the three reasons such a ranking could not be assembled from the available series are set out instead.