Medical tourism abroad costs Bangladesh dearly

Medical tourism abroad costs Bangladesh dearly as Bangladeshis spend US$5 billion annually on record only while treatments taken on tourist visas remain unaccounted for.
Experts and economists unveiled Sunday such a hopping figure of expenses on account of foreign treatments, while Bangladesh reels from foreign-exchange crunch for long with the reserves on downslide.
They said the data of very few sectors in the economy, like financial sector, are well-managed but majority data of majority of sectors like tourism and health remained unmanaged.
The remarks came at a workshop titled 'Cross-Border Data Flow: A Bangladesh Perspective', jointly organised by the Policy Research Institute of Bangladesh and the World Bank at a hotel in the capital, Dhaka.
"Bangladeshis spend more than $5 billion annually on medical treatment abroad, mainly in India and Thailand, due to their advanced healthcare systems," said Bangladesh Bank Governor Dr Ahsan H Mansur while speaking as chief guest at the event.
"The economy will remain trapped by India and Thailand, unless the health system of Bangladesh would be developed," he added.
He also said the local people have no trust on the local healthcare system and the quality service improvement is critical.
Ashikur Rahman, principal economist at the PRI, presented keynote at the event.
He said although no estimates are available to assess the contribution of smooth data flows for Bangladesh, a recent estimate suggests that a restrictive-data regime may hinder imports, enhance import prices, and thereby have deleterious impacts on economic growth.
"Majority of business entities have lower intension to share data which are shareable," he said about the hidebound business statistics.
Subrata Paul, focal point of the Health Economics Unit of the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, told the meet that the main obstacle to data sharing and data management is a lack of digital infrastructure.
Paul also said making national-healthcare card is not needed as the National Identity (NID) card is enough to address the healthcare system. "But the problem is the NID also lacks lot of basic information."
Md. Sabbir Hossain, deputy managing director and chief operating officer of BRAC Bank, suggests that institutes must work for making the data management easy. Different trading blocs like NAFTA and ASEAN have been sharing the quality data and making good business, but the SAFTA is still lagging behind.
"Also, the banks cannot make quality data until now here. The quality of data in Bangladesh is yet to be improved well, and also the digitisation," he added.
In the open-discussion session of the workshop, the speakers said the banking and telecom sectors have a lot of data but they cannot share the data because of data privacy and national security.
However, the tourism and healthcare sectors' data are not too much risky and these data can be shared within the country and outside of the country.
Later, the financial-sector data can also be shared gradually based on the safety and security of the quality data, the speakers also said.
Governor Ahsan Mansur highlighted that a significant portion of the overseas health expenditure occurs unofficially, placing considerable pressure on the country's balance of payments.
To address this issue, he calls for establishing a legal framework for data processing which would enable efficient sharing of data locally and across borders.
Dr Mansur also said the country lacks the regulatory framework in the national data- management system.
"Since there is no central data-repository system, an individual bank cannot create such a big volume of data system alone as it needs collective efforts," the governor of the central bank told the audience.
However, a national data-repository system is needed in the country, he said.
The private sector cannot make the national data-repository system, but it can help the government in making it, he added.

[email protected]