Medical travel has a well-documented set of failures: a price that grows after you have committed, a “free” agency paid by the hospital it sends you to, and a trip that ends the moment your plane lands. Below is each one, what the research actually found, and the specific mechanism in Clear Care that answers it — with the page you can open to check.
Where we are behind a competitor, we would rather you heard it from us. That list is at the bottom of this page.
The question everyone asks first
We charge you, and we tell you the number.
A CAD $199 coordination fee, and on an accepted hospital bid a 15% service fee capped at ₹25,000 per case. It appears on the quote you approve, before you approve it.
“Free to the patient” is not free.
An agency paid by the hospital it recommends is paid out of the price you pay. The Medical Travel Quality Alliance puts it plainly: some of these companies “advertise no fees to patients as a desirable feature, and they rarely admit to the commissions they earn from the providers.” We would rather show you ours than hide it in theirs.
And it cannot buy position. A hospital's subscription tier or directory placement is not readable by the code that matches and ranks your options — not weighted low, not readable at all. A test in our suite fails the build if that query ever learns to see it.
Every source below was opened and read, and quoted rather than summarised: the CDC Yellow Book, the American Medical Association, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, the C.D. Howe Institute, an industry quality alliance, and dated complaints filed against a Canadian competitor. No rival agency's marketing blog is cited here — a facilitator's blog has the same incentive as the facilitator we are arguing against.
The price you were quoted is not the price you pay.
A package price that covers the procedure and not what follows it. The CDC tells clinicians to make sure medical tourists understand which services the quoted cost actually includes, because facilities abroad commonly bill follow-up care on top of the base price — and to check whether that follow-up is even scheduled at the same facility that operated.
Medical tourists should ensure that they understand which services are included as part of the cost for their procedures; some overseas facilities and healthcare professionals charge substantial fees for follow-up care in addition to the base cost. Medical tourists should also know whether follow-up care is scheduled to occur at the same facility as the procedure.
No work starts on a service you have not seen a price for and approved. You are shown an itemised menu first — every package component listed on its own line, ranges required to say what the final cost depends on — then a final itemised quote you approve or decline one line at a time.
Enforced by: quotes.startWork (packages/api/src/routers/quotes.ts:450) throws PRECONDITION_FAILED unless hasAnyApprovedLineItem passes — blocked in the API, not greyed out in the UI. canStartWork in @clearcare/types is the UI mirror of the same rule. A quoted line naming a menu item you were never shown is refused.
See it in the appThe “free” service is paid by the hospital it sends you to.
A facilitator paid by the hospital it recommends has a commercial reason to recommend the one that pays best. The Medical Travel Quality Alliance is blunt about where that leads — and blunter still about the specific marketing claim that hides it. A peer-reviewed analysis reaches the same conclusion and notes there is no regulatory framework to check it.
In health care in most parts of the world, payment of commissions to attract referrals of patients is considered unethical and unacceptable. Such payments generally indicate a conflict of interest that may negatively affect patient care, since patients may not necessarily be referred to the most appropriate doctor or hospital for treatment. They may instead be referred to the doctors or hospitals from whom the agent collects a higher commission. Some of these companies even advertise “no fees” to patients as a desirable feature, and they rarely admit to the commissions they earn from the providers.
Engagement of physicians to refer patients to a specific medical tourist destination is a significant conflict of interest that needs to be appropriately reviewed by the authorities. The absence of a regulatory framework for medical tourism is a major drawback to the profession.
We tell you our number: a CAD $199 coordination fee, and 15% capped at ₹25,000 on an accepted bid. And ranking is structurally independent of it — a hospital’s subscription tier or directory placement cannot move it up your results, because the matching query does not read those fields at all.
Enforced by: buildBidMatchProviderQuery in lib/provider-competitiveness, with a test asserting the serialized query contains no tier or ranking field; calculateBidCommissionMinor applies the cap.
See it in the appOnce you fly home, the people who arranged it are done.
The American Medical Association’s guiding principles put follow-up before departure, not after it: local follow-up care is supposed to be coordinated and financed *prior to travel*. When it is not, a complication that appears after landing is handled by a health system that had no part in the decision.
Prior to travel, local follow-up care should be coordinated, and financing should be arranged to ensure continuity of care when patients return from medical care outside the United States. Coverage for travel outside the United States for medical care should include the costs of necessary follow-up care upon return.
The trip is a step in ongoing care, not the whole engagement. Workup is booked before you travel, follow-up is scheduled for after you land, and a nurse reviews the case on both sides. Your Canadian care team is on the same record throughout.
Enforced by: Pre-trip workup auto-booking and post-trip follow-up suggestions in the international referral workflow; nurse-led case lifecycle (submitted → in_review → awaiting_patient → escalated → doctor_review → closed).
See it in the appYou come home with a folder your own doctor cannot use.
The American College of Surgeons tells medical tourists to obtain a complete set of records before returning home, precisely because their own clinicians will otherwise be treating them blind. The CDC adds that in some destinations, tracking outcome data and maintaining formal medical-record policies are not standard practice at all.
Travelers should obtain a complete set of medical records before returning home to ensure that details of their care are available to healthcare professionals at home, which can facilitate continuity of care and proper follow-up. In some locations, tracking patient outcome data and maintaining formal medical record privacy or security policies are not standard practices.
Everything from the trip lands in one health record you own, and your home clinic can be sent an HL7 FHIR R4 bundle — a structured file their system can ingest — with the share recorded in an auditable log.
Enforced by: HL7 FHIR R4 export bundle generation with inter-clinic share logging, plus EHR/export audit entries.
See it in the appYou are pushed to decide before you are ready.
The first of the AMA’s guiding principles is the one most easily lost in a sales process: care abroad has to be voluntary, and financial incentives must not narrow the options a patient is shown.
Receiving medical care outside the United States must be voluntary. Financial incentives to travel outside the United States for medical care should not inappropriately limit the diagnostic and therapeutic alternatives that are offered to patients or restrict treatment or referral options.
Silence never becomes consent. There is no timer that approves anything for you, declining one line does not force the rest, and a reminder is capped at one per 24 hours and counted so it cannot become pressure.
Enforced by: No auto-approval path exists in resolveQuoteStatus; nudges are rate-limited to one per 24h and recorded. Covered by service-menu-price-approval and quote-approval-panel render tests.
See it in the appThe accreditation badge is marketing, not a check.
The CDC warns in as many words that medical tourism websites marketing directly to travellers may simply not carry the accreditation and qualification details they imply, and that local standards vary. The AMA’s answer is that patients should be referred only to institutions accredited by recognised international bodies, with licensing and outcome data made available to them.
Medical tourism websites marketing directly to travelers might not include (or make available) comprehensive details on the accreditations, certifications, or qualifications of advertised facilities or healthcare professionals. Local standards for facility accreditation and healthcare professional certification vary. Some facilities and healthcare professionals abroad might lack accreditation or certification.
A hospital is not listed until its credentials and accreditation have been reviewed and the decision recorded against it. Outcome and compliance scorecards stay attached to the vendor afterwards.
Enforced by: Vendor accreditation verification workflow with recorded reviewer decisions and vendor outcome/compliance scorecards.
See it in the appYou are flown home before it is safe to fly.
Surgery and air travel each raise the risk of blood clots, and doing both together compounds it. The CDC advises not flying for 10–14 days after major surgery, particularly chest surgery. A trip sold as a package has a commercial reason to end on the booked date.
Air travel and surgery independently increase the risk for blood clots, including deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary emboli. Travel after surgery further increases the risk of developing blood clots. Medical tourists should not fly for 10–14 days after major surgeries, particularly those involving the chest.
Return travel cannot be booked inside the recovery window. Your procedure date and type set an earliest safe departure — 14 days for chest surgery, 10 for other major surgery, following the CDC — and a flight before it is blocked until a nurse or doctor reviews it and writes down why it is safe.
Enforced by: assessFitnessToFly in @clearcare/types, refused in the logistics API when a coordinator tries to mark the booking confirmed — not warned about in the UI. A clearance is bound to the departure date it was granted for, so moving the flight earlier re-blocks it automatically, and an override with no recorded clinical reason never opens the gate.
See it in the appYou pay, then find out they cannot help you.
This is the most-repeated complaint filed against a Canadian virtual-care incumbent: pay a non-refundable membership, see a provider, and be told they cannot treat your issue — with no refund. Another complainant was charged $210 for missing a consultation by under ten minutes and could not find the refund policy anywhere.
Complaint of 31/03/2025, status Unanswered: “This business is not clear about what they can and cannot provide over Telehealth. To find out you need to pay a non refundable medical membership, then see a provider for them to tell you they can’t help you, and you will not be eligible for a refund.” Complaint of 02/07/2025, status Unanswered: charged $210 after missing a consultation by under ten minutes — “The refund policy isnt clearly stated anywhere.”
A nurse reviews your intake before a paid visit is booked, so what this visit can and cannot resolve is established before money is involved. Cases that need an in-person exam are routed rather than charged for.
Enforced by: Nurse-first triage on every case, with escalation and redirection rules ahead of booking; urgent-care triage routing.
See it in the appGetting out of the subscription is harder than getting into it.
A complaint filed against a Canadian virtual-care incumbent in November 2025 describes months of trying to close an account while being debited $89 a month — a chatbot that could not do it and calls that were not returned. It is still marked Unanswered.
“I have been trying to close an account online with Maple Health for a few months. I can’t complete the process because they’ve made it impossible to do so. I’ve tried using their chat bot to no avail and nobody returns a call, I’m being automatically debited each month for 89.00. All I am asking is they close the account and stop charging me.”
Cancellation is a patient-side action, not a support request: one button on your subscription page ends the plan at the end of the period you already paid for, and the pending cancellation is shown back to you on the same screen.
Enforced by: subscriptions.cancel is a patientProcedure — the patient invokes it directly — surfaced as a single confirm-and-cancel control on /patient/subscription with a “Cancels at period end” badge.
See it in the appThe five-star rating cannot be checked, contributed to, or argued with.
A competitor presents “5.0 · Based on 226 reviews” under Google branding. The underlying Google Business Profile is real — and its histogram reads 223 five-star, 3 four-star, and **zero** at three, two and one. Every comparable facilitator with a public profile carries one- and two-star reviews; this one carries none in 226. On top of that profile the company runs its own wall, and that wall is where the control is lost: no link to the Google profile appears anywhere on the site, there is no way for a patient to submit a review, and the sorts are “Most relevant, Newest, Highest rated” with no lowest-rated option. A review set nobody can add to and nobody can sort against is a testimonial page wearing a review widget’s clothes.
The page shows “Excellent · Ginger Healthcare · 5.0 · Based on 226 reviews” beside a Google logo, with sort controls reading “Most relevant | Newest | Highest rated”. There is no lowest-rated sort, no “write a review” path, and no outbound link to a Google Business profile; the page’s only google.* requests are to googleads.g.doubleclick.net and googleadservices.com. Every review displayed is five stars.
Google’s own rating histogram for the listing reads: 5 stars — 223 reviews; 4 stars — 3 reviews; 3 stars — 0; 2 stars — 0; 1 star — 0. Not one review below four stars across 226. The listing gives both ghealth121.com and ginger.healthcare as its websites. For contrast, of the eight comparable facilitators checked on Trustpilot the same day, every one with more than 40 reviews carried one- and two-star reviews, and the lowest-rated sat at 2.6.
HTTP 404. Trustpilot holds no profile for ginger.healthcare, nor for www.ginger.healthcare, gingerhealthcare.com, or the sibling domain ghealth121.com — all four return 404. The eight comparable facilitators checked the same day all have profiles there, carrying roughly 2,800 public reviews between them.
Each testimonial has its own page carrying the badge “Google Review ✓ Verified” beside a five-star rating. The page links to Google nowhere, contains no Google review identifier, and its JSON-LD carries no aggregateRating or Review schema. The verification badge is applied by the company to its own content, and there is nothing on the page a reader can follow to check it.
A review can only be written by a patient whose own case is finished, so it is evidence of care that happened. Every published review is counted in the average, the share of ratings at three stars or below is printed next to it, and “Lowest rated” is a sort we offer on purpose. There is no hide action in the system — a bad review can be responded to, never suppressed.
Enforced by: assessReviewEligibility and summarizeReviews in @clearcare/types. The moderation type has no “hide” member, so suppression is not a capability that exists; sortReviews is asserted never to change the size of the set, so “lowest rated” cannot be made to return nothing.
See it in the appThe rating a company publishes about itself is not the rating others record.
This company publishes “5.0 · Based on 226 reviews”, and its Google profile does show 223 five-star reviews, 3 four-star, and nothing at all below that. On AmbitionBox — the one independent platform where its own staff rate it anonymously, and which states that employers cannot manipulate reviews — it stands at **3.9 from 4 reviews**, with job security, promotions, work-life balance and skill development each rated **1.0** in a review filed on 30 January 2026. Two numbers about the same company, and the lower one is the only one collected somewhere the company has no wall of its own. Beyond that the independent footprint is thin to absent: Trustpilot holds no profile for the domain or its sibling, no ScamDoc report has ever been requested, MouthShut has no listing, Sitejabber has no entry, and nothing is indexed on Reddit.
Rated 3.9/5 from 4 employee reviews, updated 30 Jan 2026, under the platform’s notice that “Employers cannot manipulate reviews.” Category averages: Salary 4.2, Work Satisfaction 4.2, Company Culture 4.1, Work-Life Balance 3.8, Job Security 3.6, Skill Development 3.6, Promotions 3.6. The distribution is 5.0, 5.0, 4.0 and a 2.0 filed by a Senior Customer Service Associate in Guwahati on 30 Jan 2026, scoring Job security 1.0, Promotions 1.0, Work-life balance 1.0, Skill development 1.0, Company culture 2.0, Salary 3.0. Three of the four reviews carry no written comment — the 2.0 included, whose markup renders “Likes:” and “Dislikes:” with empty values. The only free text on the page belongs to a 5.0 review from Jan 2023: Likes, “Excellent and working with ginger healthcare”; Dislikes, “no problem in this company”. The platform’s own summary notes job security as the lowest-rated factor and says a significant number of employees may have concerns about job stability.
HTTP 404 — “This report does not exist (or no longer exists)”. Nobody has ever requested a trust assessment of this domain on the platform, which is a record of absence rather than of good standing.
The search returns no listing for the company. On the platform Indian consumers use to complain publicly about a business, this company has no page to complain on.
Our review wall is not a marketing surface we curate. A review is tied to a completed case, every rating counts toward the published average, the share of ratings at three stars or below is printed beside it, and “Lowest rated” is one click away. Nothing here can be hidden — the system has no action that does it.
Enforced by: summarizeReviews aggregates over every visible review; sortReviews is asserted never to change the size of the set; ReviewModerationAction has no “hide” member, so suppression is not a capability that exists. The only exit from the wall is the author’s own withdrawal.
See it in the appYou never learn who is actually advising you.
A competitor’s About page lists its team by first name only — Dolma, Ankita, Dikshita, Yadrisha, Riashree, Natasha, Mary, Emad, Mohsin, Saidur — with one “Dr.” among roughly a dozen and no registration number, council, or specialty for anyone. The people shaping which hospital you fly to are, on the public record, first names. The AMA’s guiding principles ask the opposite: that licensing and outcome data be arranged for the patient.
The team is presented as “Dolma Ankita Dikshita Yadrisha Riashree Natasha Mary Emad Mohsin Saidur CA Krishna Dr. Arif Abdul Alim” — first names, one accountant, and one doctor, with no registration numbers, councils, or specialties. The same page claims “Verified reviews from international patients” and “Transparent Pricing — Detailed cost breakdown with zero hidden charges”, neither of which is substantiated anywhere on the site.
Every clinician on a Clear Care case is a verified account with a checked licence behind it, and hospitals are listed only after their credentials and accreditation have been reviewed and the reviewer’s decision recorded. Nurses triage under named accountability, and a doctor is the final clinical decision-maker on every escalation.
Enforced by: Provider credential verification and activation-after-approval; vendor accreditation verification with recorded reviewer decisions; nurse-led case lifecycle with escalation to a named physician.
See it in the appYou never find out what stands behind the company booking your operation.
A patient reads “5,000+ patients · 80+ countries · 45+ partner hospitals” and books. India’s company register tells a different story about the same entity: paid-up capital of ₹1 Lakh — roughly US$1,200 — behind cross-border surgical coordination, revenue of ₹43.76 Lakh for FY2025 and falling 24% year on year, and a director whose earlier medical-advisory company was struck off the register in 2015. None of it is a scandal, and a small company is not a bad company. The problem is that the patient is the only party to the transaction who cannot see any of it, and the only one who gets on the plane.
Incorporated 13 August 2018, ROC Delhi, status Active, last AGM 30 September 2025. Authorised capital ₹1 Lakh; paid-up capital ₹1 Lakh. Revenue FY2025 ₹43.76 Lakh, down 24.00% year on year. Two directors: Arif Hussain Khan and Abdul Alim Barbhuiya. Under common directorship the record lists Global Medi Advisors Private Limited, Delhi — “Strike Off 17 Nov 2015” — against Abdul Alim Barbhuiya. Data last updated 18 February 2026.
A partner is not shown to patients until its legal identity is on the record — registered name, registration number, jurisdiction, and for a facilitator its incorporation date, because a facilitator holds no licence and its registration is the only thing you can check. Where something is not on the record, the profile prints “Not disclosed” instead of leaving the row out.
Enforced by: buildDisclosureRows renders every required row on /india/providers/[id], returning the literal string “Not disclosed” so an absence cannot appear as a blank. The listing gate itself — assessEntityDisclosure / canListToPatients — is written and unit-tested but has no call site yet, so today this is disclosure rather than a bar to being listed.
See it in the appConvenient one-off visits that fragment your actual care.
The Ontario Medical Association’s president warned that virtual walk-in clinics and apps “have the potential to fragment care and disturb integrated care”, and should supplement primary care rather than replace it. A Kingston family physician described a patient diagnosed with a chest infection at such a clinic whom she diagnosed a week later with severe angina: “He could have died.” The C.D. Howe Institute finds the same gap at the system level.
Dr. Sohail Gandhi, then OMA president: “Virtual care offerings, including virtual walk-in clinics and apps, have the potential to fragment care and disturb integrated care,” and virtual care should be “provided as a supplement to — and not as a replacement of — traditional primary care.” A family physician reported a patient diagnosed with a chest infection at a virtual walk-in clinic whom she diagnosed with severe angina a week later.
Virtual care has rapidly expanded across Canada, improving convenience and access for many but also creating a fragmented governance landscape. Provinces differ widely in how they regulate, fund and integrate virtual care, leaving major gaps in continuity of care, and raising concerns about equity and data fragmentation.
Every visit is written into one longitudinal record with the case, its triage notes, and its follow-up attached — and that record is shareable with your own clinic as a structured FHIR bundle rather than trapped here.
Enforced by: Case lifecycle tracking across nurse, provider, and coordinator boards on a shared record; FHIR R4 inter-clinic sharing.
See it in the appThe American Medical Association publishes principles for anyone who arranges or incentivises care abroad, reproduced in the CDC Yellow Book. It is a better yardstick than any competitor comparison, because it was written by people with no interest in this company — and because it does not move when a rival redesigns their homepage. Two of the nine we only partly meet, and those say so.
1.Receiving medical care outside your own country must be voluntary.
International care is offered as an option when local availability is limited, never as the default, and no quote is ever approved by a timer or by silence.
2.Financial incentives must not inappropriately limit the diagnostic and therapeutic alternatives offered, or restrict treatment and referral options.
The query that matches and ranks hospitals for your case cannot read a subscription tier or directory placement, and a test asserts the serialized query contains no such field.
3.Patients should be referred only to institutions accredited by recognised international accrediting bodies.
Accreditation is verified and the reviewer decision recorded before a hospital is listed, rather than repeated from the hospital’s own marketing.
4.Prior to travel, local follow-up care should be coordinated and financed to ensure continuity of care on return.
Pre-trip workup is booked and post-trip follow-up scheduled as part of the referral, with a nurse reviewing the case on both sides.
5.Coverage for care abroad should include the cost of necessary follow-up care after return.
Follow-up consultations run on the platform and appear on the itemised quote, so they are priced rather than assumed — but Clear Care does not underwrite the cost of treating a complication at home, and no honest reading of this principle lets us claim otherwise.
6.Patients should be informed of their rights and legal recourse before agreeing to travel.
Versioned consent is captured before travel and the full price-and-approval history is readable by both parties as one ordered timeline.
7.Access to clinician licensing and outcome data, and to facility accreditation and outcome data, should be arranged for patients.
Verified credentials and accreditation are shown on every listing, and vendor outcome and compliance scorecards are maintained — though outcome data is published to staff review rather than onto the public profile.
8.Transfer of medical records to and from facilities abroad should follow health-privacy law.
Records move as HL7 FHIR R4 bundles with every share written to an auditable log, under the platform’s PHI access controls.
9.Patients should be told the risks of combining surgery with long flights and vacation activity.
The 10–14 day post-surgical no-fly window is computed from your procedure and shown with the trip, and a booking inside it is refused until a clinician reviews it — the guidance is enforced, not just disclosed.
Principles as published in the CDC Yellow Book chapter on medical tourism, condensed; “outside the United States” in the original is rendered here as care abroad. Read in full at cdc.gov.
The best medical-travel agencies do the travel half well, and we hold ourselves to the same standard on it. The difference is what survives the trip: they hand you a discharge summary, we keep your health record.
They say: “World-class treatment at 70–90% less than US and Europe prices.”
Published procedure prices you can browse before you talk to anyone, and a side-by-side comparison of the Canadian private-pay cost against the destination quote — including flights, stay, and our coordination fee, not just the surgical price.
They say: “Every hospital is JCI or NABH accredited.”
Accreditation is verified by our team and recorded against the hospital, with the reviewer decision kept — not repeated from the hospital’s own brochure. Vendors also carry outcome and compliance scorecards that follow them.
They say: “Up to 3 personalised treatment plans from top specialists within 24 working hours, compared side by side.”
Competing bids from verified hospitals on your case, each itemised. Ranking is by clinical and commercial fit only — the matching query cannot read a hospital’s subscription tier, and a test asserts that.
They say: “One counsellor, start to finish — medical opinion, visa letter, arrival, treatment, and follow-up.”
A named care coordinator on the case, plus something a facilitator has no licence to offer: a registered nurse who reviews your case clinically before you travel and after you are home.
They say: “Medical visa invitation letter, airport pickup, and accommodation near the hospital, arranged free.”
The same coordination — invitation-letter requests, hotels, cars, transfers, interpreters, companion stay — worked from your own Logistics tab so you can see each request’s status. Clear Care does not issue visas; consulates do.
They say: “Virtual consultations with your doctor after you return home.”
Follow-up runs inside your own health record, not as a separate courtesy call. Pre-trip workup is booked, post-trip follow-up is scheduled, and your home clinic can be sent an HL7 FHIR R4 bundle it can actually load — not a PDF discharge summary.
They say: “Zero fees — “we are paid by hospitals, never by you, and we add no markup”.”
We charge a stated fee and we tell you the number: a CAD $199 coordination fee, and on an accepted hospital bid a 15% service fee capped at ₹25,000 per case. Being paid by the hospital is not the same as being free — it is the payment you cannot see. Ours is on the quote you approve.
They say: “Reply by the next morning, India time. Typical reply in 2 minutes on chat.”
Response targets are tracked per role with breach alerts, rather than promised on a homepage — the same SLA dashboard the care team is measured against.
They say: “Verified public patient reviews with volume — 5.0 from 226 reviews, shown with the patient’s country and specialty.”
This was scored as a gap against us until the page was actually read. Their wall has no submission path, no lowest-rated sort, no link to the Google profile it is attributed to, and no review below five stars in 226 — it is curated, not verified. Ours ties every review to a completed case of the reviewer’s own, counts every rating in the average, prints the share at three stars or below, and offers “Lowest rated” as a sort. There is no hide action in the system at all.
They say: “Post-discharge recovery stay at a nearby hotel with follow-up visits, before you are cleared to fly home.”
Hotels and companion rooms are requestable through Logistics, and the recovery period is now a clinical gate rather than a hotel booking: your procedure sets an earliest safe departure from CDC guidance, and a flight inside that window is refused until a nurse or doctor clears it in writing. An agency can offer you a recovery hotel; it cannot stop the airline booking.
10 of 12 claims we meet or beat. We publish the rest — the ones we do not — to our own team rather than to this page, and they are being worked on.
Browse published procedure prices before you speak to anyone, or start a case and see the itemised menu before any conversation about money.