BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina has formed an alliance with the private medical centre by which it will direct members interested in overseas medical treatment to Bumrungrad.

Through its subsidiary, Companion Global Healthcare, BlueCross BlueShield will provide information and direct members to Bumrungrad's website and a US-based contact centre managed by World Access, a travel-insurance and international healthcare-assistance company.

This alliance is a first between a major US healthcare insurer and a Thai hospital. It is expected to pave the way for more medical travel to Thailand. Increasingly, Americans are looking overseas for lower-cost medical treatment, and this trend has been widely featured in news media and medical journals, like the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine.

David Boucher, assistant vice president of healthcare services for BlueCross South Carolina, visited Bumrungrad last July after seeing the hospital featured on "60 Minutes" and reading about it in Time magazine. After a four-day inspection, he came away convinced that Bumrungrad was "a first-rate medical centre and a facility our organisation could endorse to its members".

Medical tourism continues to be a shining star in the Thai tourism galaxy, attracting "high-value" tourists to the Kingdom who stay longer and spend more than those in other tourist categories. Ruben Toral, Bumrungrad's group marketing director, believes that medical tourism will eventually lead to medical outsourcing. "It's inevitable," he said. "Corporations and insurers alike are looking for new solutions to drive down the cost of healthcare, and we are part of the solution."

Bumrungrad International is Southeast Asia's premier private hospital and a regional referral centre for advanced care, offering 554 beds, 30 speciality centres, 900 medical specialists and over 800 nurses. It is Thailand's first JCI-accredited hospital and serves more than one million patients yearly from 190 different countries.