An emerging trend is what has become commonly known as ‘Medical Tourism’ where patients travel to overseas destinations for specialised surgical treatments and other forms of medical care. With the rise of more affordable cross-border travel and rapid technological developments these movements are becoming more commonplace. A key driver is the platform provided by the internet for gaining access to healthcare information and advertising. There has been relatively little attention given to the role and impact of web-based information to inform Medical Tourism decisions.This article provides a brief overview of the most recent development in Medical Tourism and examines how this is linked to the emergence of specialized internet web sites. It produces a summary of the functionality of medical tourist sites, and situates Medical Tourism informatics within the broader literatures relating to information search, information quality and decision-making.This paper is both a call to strengthen the empirical evidence in this area, and also to advocate integrating Medical Tourism research within a broader conceptual framework.

The aim of this article is to contribute towards greater theoretical and empirical understanding about medical tourism developments globally. This evidence leads us to examine some widelyheld assumptions regarding the size and shape of global medical travel. Our paper examines three central issues: (1) Do published figures and projections ‘add-up’, are figures from multiple sources consistent, and what decisions and interests are involved for those compiling these statistics? (2) How should any emerging global industry be understood and explained? (3) Given this analysis and market understanding how, if at all, can national governments stimulate activity?

There is a growing global market in healthcare and patients. And while there is a small body of evidence emerging around this phenomenon commonly known as medical tourism there remain significant unanswered policy and research questions which need to be addressed. We outline some of the key issues set against the six key disciplinary preoccupations of the journal: epidemiology, health economics, health policy ethics, politics of health, health management, and health policy.