What You Should Know:
– Responding to the growing need to simplify access to global health care for medical tourists, Mastercard and the Medical Tourism Association (MTA) have announced an exclusive partnership to modernize the end-to-end health care experience for patients and providers around the world.
– The Medical Tourism Association will utilize Mastercard’s commercial virtual card technology to go beyond arranging treatments to also facilitating fast and secure payments with health care providers.
Revolutionizing Medical Tourism: MTA and Mastercard Introduce Virtual Card Technology for Seamless Global Healthcare Payments
This initiative marks a groundbreaking move for the medical tourism industry, which has historically relied on cash and wire transfers. These traditional methods have led to financial opacity and limited payment options for individuals seeking treatments abroad. According to insights from a recent Medical Tourism Patient Survey, over half of patients globally have expressed concerns about international payments due to hidden costs, exchange rate complexities, and increased fraud risk, highlighting the need to improve the payment process.
Patients will now be able to book and pay for their treatment using their preferred payment method, with the Medical Tourism Association (MTA) handling the rest through Mastercard’s virtual card technology. Once the payment is initiated and validated, the MTA’s banking partner will issue a Mastercard virtual card to pay the healthcare provider directly. This introduction of virtual cards offers numerous benefits to providers, including increased security, robust controls, and real-time remittance data for more efficient reconciliation.
To address broader issues in healthcare payments, the MTA is developing Better by MTA, a user-friendly platform integrated with Mastercard’s payment capabilities. This platform aims to combine medical and travel services, allowing patients to manage every aspect of their journey from scheduling and paying for procedures to reserving travel, transportation, and lodging, all within a single platform. Better by MTA is designed to simplify travel choices, streamline the payment process, and enable effortless comparison of care options, replacing multiple booking tools with a connected, one-stop experience for medical travel needs.
“As a global technology company, we’re constantly innovating to solve pain points across multiple industries and simplify the way money flows across people and businesses,” said Chad Wallace, global head of Commercial Solutions at Mastercard, “We’re embedding our technologies to drive safer and faster payment experiences at scale, and this latest collaboration unlocks our ability to further extend the advantages of Mastercard virtual cards to reimagine the health care ecosystem.”
