Partner and Commission Disclosure

When somebody recommends a hospital to you, the first useful question is whether they are paid to. Almost nobody in medical tourism answers it, and the silence is not accidental — the sector runs substantially on commissions that patients are never told about, which is precisely why patients are right to be suspicious of it.

We would rather answer the question than be one more site that does not.

This page covers three things. What we require of a hospital before we will work with it at all, which is where authorisation comes in. How we decide which centre to suggest for a particular case. And how money moves, including whether any of it moves from a hospital to us.

None of it is complicated, and that is the point. A relationship that needs three paragraphs of explanation to sound acceptable usually is not.

One framing worth being clear about at the start: we are an intermediary. We introduce patients to hospitals. That is a legitimate service — most patients cannot identify which centres abroad run a programme for their condition, cannot evaluate them, and cannot correspond with them in a shared language. It is also a role with a well-known failure mode, which is the intermediary optimising for its own commission rather than for the patient's treatment. Everything below is about that failure mode.

The threshold requirement is authorisation. Every hospital we introduce patients to holds the authorisations its own national health authority requires for the transplantation it performs. In Türkiye, where most of our readers are treated, transplant centres operate under authorisation from the Ministry of Health and work inside the national organ and tissue coordination system. A centre that could not lawfully perform the operation is not a centre we would send anybody to, and there is no version of this business in which that is negotiable.

Beyond authorisation, we check that the organisation is real and that what we publish about it is accurate: that it exists as a legal entity, that it operates the programme we say it operates, that the surgeons named are registered, and that the details on its page match what the hospital and the public registers say. A person does that check, records what was checked and against what, and only a medical reviewer or an administrator can mark it as verified.

We ask about the source of tissue. For corneal transplantation, a centre should be able to name the eye bank that supplies it and say whether tissue is domestically recovered or imported. A hospital that will not answer that question has told us something we act on.

A hospital accreditation is published under the same discipline. Where a hospital holds one and we publish it, we record which body awarded it, the certificate reference where one is published, when it was awarded and when it expires. An accreditation that has lapsed stops being displayed rather than sitting on a page as a stale claim, because an expired certificate presented as current is a lie told by omission.

And we stop working with a centre that stops meeting any of this. That has a cost, and it is a cost worth paying.

Treatment is paid to the hospital. We do not collect payment for medical care, we do not hold patient funds in transit, and every invoice for treatment comes from the centre that provides it. That is deliberate rather than incidental: it means there is never a question about where your money went, and it removes the arrangement that causes most of the financial losses patients report in this sector.

Where any fee is charged for a service of ours, the amount and what it covers is stated in writing before you commit, and you can decline it. We will never take a payment you were not told about in advance, and we will never take one out of a sum you believed was going to a hospital.

Where a hospital pays us for introducing a patient, we say so here rather than leaving you to assume it. You are entitled to know whether the party recommending a centre has a financial interest in that recommendation, and to weigh what we tell you accordingly.

What does not happen, in any arrangement: no hospital buys placement on this platform, no hospital pays for a better position in a listing, no hospital has approval over what we publish about it, and no page is written because a centre asked for it. Our editorial policy sets out the separation and the test we apply to ourselves.

And the practical rule we tell every patient regardless of any of this: pay the hospital's official account, named in your contract, and never an individual. That single habit prevents most of the money that goes missing in medical travel.

A conflict of interest is not a scandal. It is a structural fact about being paid by one party to advise another, and the honest response is to name it and build against it rather than deny it exists.

The conflict in our position is simple to state. If a hospital pays for introductions, we have a financial reason to send patients there rather than somewhere clinically better, and a financial reason not to tell a patient that no suitable pathway exists.

So we build against both.

Clinical suitability is decided before cost or commercial arrangements are considered at all — the ordering in the table above is the actual ordering, not a presentational one. A centre that is not clinically right for a case does not become right because of an arrangement.

We publish pages whose whole content is that a pathway is not available. Heart and lung transplantation cannot be travelled for, because those organs are allocated by national systems to patients on their own lists. Saying so loses us every enquiry those pages attract, and they stay.

We tell patients when the honest answer is to be treated at home. For a good number of people who write to us, the best available advice is that their own health system can do this and travelling would add risk without adding benefit.

And we will name a centre we do not work with when it is the right one. If the programme that suits a case is somewhere we have no relationship, that is still the answer.

None of this makes us disinterested. It makes the conflict visible and constrained, which is the most any intermediary can honestly offer.

This matters if anything goes wrong, so it is worth being exact rather than reassuring.

A hospital on this platform is an independent organisation. It is not our agent, not our subsidiary, not a franchise, and not under our direction. We do not employ its surgeons, we do not run its theatres, and we cannot instruct it to do anything.

When you go ahead with treatment, your contract for that treatment is between you and the hospital, under the law of its country. The clinical decisions in your care are made by its team using their own professional judgement — which is what you want, and is the reason an intermediary should never be able to overrule them.

What that means practically: a complaint or a claim about the care itself lies against the hospital, through its own complaints process and its country's regulator. What we are answerable for is our own part — the accuracy of what we told you, the honesty of the introduction, and the handling of your information.

Our complaints page explains what to do when something goes wrong, including the parts we can help with even where the responsibility is not ours: taking it up with the centre, helping you obtain your records, and reviewing whether anything we published contributed to it. Where we got something wrong, we will say so.

We also tell you which centre has your case and how to contact them directly, precisely so that you are never dependent on us to reach the people treating you. A patient who can only reach their hospital through an agency is in a bad position, and we will not put anybody in it.