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UPMC launches UPMC Global Care program for international patients

The international market for health services is booming, with up to 80,000 patients traveling to a foreign country for medical care every year. To attract a greater share of these patients to our hospitals, UPMC has launched an innovative program — UPMC Global Care.

With easily accessible facilities and many world-class clinical specialties, UPMC is positioned ideally to serve itinerant patients. UPMC Global Care is designed to provide residents of foreign countries with convenient, step-by-step, integrated care arrangements that include not only medical services, but also transportation and lodging assistance, language services, religious and cultural guidance, and more. A single invoice covers all costs, streamlining the billing process and minimizing “red tape.”

Although UPMC has treated international patients for years, the programs for promoting UPMC to them and for helping them navigate our health care system have been fragmented. UPMC Global Care unifies and enhances existing operations and introduces new levels of customer service, such as assigning each patient a “hospitality manager” who serves as a health care concierge for the nonmedical aspects of the patient’s UPMC experience.

UPMC Global Care also coordinates care between UPMC’s U.S. and overseas facilities, enabling a patient who has surgery at a UPMC hospital in Pittsburgh to receive follow-up care at one of UPMC’s facilities in Europe. The domestic facilities treating UPMC Global Care patients are UPMC Presbyterian, UPMC Mercy, Magee-Womens Hospital of UPMC, and the Hillman Cancer Center. The principal foreign hospitals involved are UPMC Beacon Hospital in Ireland and ISMETT in Italy; UPMC’s Cyprus facilities also are being used.

The clinical areas emphasized through UPMC Global Care include transplantation, neurosurgery, oncology, cardiology, orthopaedic surgery, and urology. Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC has a similar program for international pediatric patients, Passport Care. Initially, UPMC is marketing Global Care primarily to foreign embassies in the United States, enabling UPMC to reach large numbers of international patients with the private means or government support to  seek care at UPMC. The embassy outreach program is under way, and eventually UPMC plans to contact more than 100 embassies. UPMC physicians whom international patients approach directly also may arrange services through UPMC Global Care.

UPMC Global Care represents a collaboration among the International and Commercial Services Division, Hospital and Community Services Division, Physician Services Division, Nursing, Finance, Information Services Division (ISD), UPMC Health Plan, and the Communications, Marketing, and Strategic Planning group.

For more information about UPMC Global Care, contact Loretta Hanwell at 412-647-7114 or hanwellL@upmc.edu.

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