Christian El-Khouri
Christian El-Khouri is a health and medical tourism professional with over 12 years of hands-on industry experience and a lifetime of immersion in a field his family has been part of for generations. Spanning international patient services, healthcare consulting, destination development, and digital health, his expertise covers the full value chain of global health travel. Based in Wiesbaden, Germany, he has advised hospitals, government bodies, regional clusters, and startups across Europe, the Middle East, and beyond on strategy, international patient management, compliance, and business development. He previously built and headed the consulting department at MESC International Patient Service GmbH, Germany's first and oldest medical tourism facilitator, and co-founded IPS-Germany, the international patient service brand operated by MESC; he holds no current position at either. Co-Founder and Vice President of the European Health and Medical Tourism Association (EHMTA), he is a published author and sought-after international speaker, regularly invited to share his perspective at industry events spanning from Saudi Arabia to South Korea, bringing a grounded, critical, and forward-looking voice to global conversations about the future of health travel. He holds an MBA in International Healthcare Management from Frankfurt School of Finance and Management and an LLB in Business Law. At Health Tourism News, he serves as Editor-in-Chief, applying his cross-border expertise and broad network of industry connections to deliver independent, authoritative coverage of the global health tourism industry.
Disclosure Christian El-Khouri is Co-Founder and Vice President of the European Health and Medical Tourism Association (EHMTA) and a board advisor to ZagrebMed, HTN's destination partner for Croatia. Both roles are unpaid. He previously built and headed the consulting department at MESC International Patient Service GmbH and co-founded IPS-Germany, the international patient service brand operated by MESC. He holds no current position at either company. Health Tourism News is owned and funded by him personally and accepts no payment from clinics, hospitals or providers.
- Medical tourism
- Health tourism
- International patient services
- Healthcare consulting
- Cross-border healthcare
- Health tourism destination development
Latest from Christian
Showing the 24 most recent of 163 published articles.
- Weekly Digest This Week in Medical Tourism: 17 September – 7 October 2026 Korea will certify 112 medical tourism facilitators from 1 October, 90 of them in greater Seoul, a group that handled about 310,000 foreign patients, 15 per cent of the national total. Egypt's Healthcare Authority received 13,370 foreign patients in 2025 against 2,075 in 2022, on income of 3.8 million US dollars.
- Weekly Digest This Week in Medical Tourism: 8–28 October 2026 Indonesia's deputy health minister put the money leaving the country with patients treated abroad at Rp150 trillion a year, as a Batam to Penang route opened and Malaysia took 21 hospitals to Jakarta. Vietnam named eight priority localities for medical tourism, and India told every state to enforce the display of hospital rates.
- Weekly Digest This Week in Medical Tourism: 27 August – 16 September 2026 South Korea treated 2.01 million foreign patients in 2025, yet the first half of 2026 added almost no new cardholders: average spending per card rose 30.1 per cent while the number of cards used rose 1.0 per cent. India set a target of 10 million patients a year against medical visa issuance that has fallen in each of the last two years.
- Weekly Digest This Week in Medical Tourism: 20–26 August 2026 Indian government counts put foreign medical arrivals at 507,244 in 2025 against 644,387 in 2024. Bangladesh supplied 325,127 of the later figure and 482,336 of the earlier one. Four governments moved on the unregulated edge of the trade in the same week.
- Weekly Digest This Week in Medical Tourism: 13–19 August 2026 China's National Health Commission put 1.28 million international patients through its key foreign-oriented hospitals, a rise of 73.6 per cent in three years. Latvia counted 35,851 and a fall of a quarter. The two numbers do not measure the same thing.
- Cosmetic Tourism South Korea Undercuts America but Not Turkey A Seoul rhinoplasty costs a quarter to a half of the American price. A Seoul veneer costs more than a British one and several times a Turkish one. The destination is not the unit of comparison. The procedure is.
- Fertility Tourism Spain and Greece Report IVF Success Differently Two of Europe's largest fertility destinations quote comparable prices and comparable-sounding success rates. Only one of them has a national registry a patient can check the claim against.
- Medical Tourism Mexico and Turkey Price Against Different Home Markets Tijuana quotes in US dollars. Istanbul quotes in sterling. Neither quotes in its own currency, and the multiple each corridor lands on says more about the patient than about the local cost of surgery.
- Medical Tourism Turkey's Deepest Discounts Sit on Its Safest Procedures Four Health Tourism News guides price four Turkish procedures against the same British patient. Rank them by saving and rank them by what goes wrong, and the two lists come out close to reversed.
- Dental Tourism Dental Implant Prices Abroad Hide Three Different Units Across six Health Tourism News country guides a single implanted tooth runs from $270 to $3,150. Part of that spread is price. A good part of it is that the six markets do not headline the same thing.
- Weekly Digest This Week in Medical Tourism: 6–12 August 2026 Vietnam's health ministry has put both sides of its medical travel ledger in one document: an estimated USD 1 to 2 billion coming in each year against USD 2 to 3 billion going out. Nigeria, Bangladesh and India moved on the same arithmetic in the same week, and the market estimates their governments were working from do not agree.
- Medical Tourism Why Medical Tourism to Germany Declined The Legal and Systemic Causes
- Weekly Digest This Week in Medical Tourism: 30 July – 5 August 2026 Dermatology has overtaken plastic surgery as the largest category of foreign medical spending in South Korea, at 67.5% against 21.3% in the first half of 2026, reversing the 2024 split. Medical services grew 98% year on year, faster than any other category BC Card reports. Australia, Nigeria and India each published figures on their own patient flows in the same week.
- Weekly Digest This Week in Medical Tourism: 22–29 July 2026 South Korea treated 2.01 million foreign patients in 2025, up 71.7 per cent on the year, and nearly a third of them came from China. Uzbekistan drew 93.9 per cent of its patients from three neighbours and 119 from the rest of the world combined. Eight days of government announcements were aimed at the country next door, not at long-haul demand.
- Health Tourism This Week in Medical Tourism: 14–21 July 2026 This is the Health Tourism News roundup for the week of 14 to 21 July 2026. A Frost and Sullivan analysis put Malaysia's private hospital capacity second in...
- Health Tourism Airlines Move To The Centre Of Medical Tourism This is the Health Tourism News roundup for the week of 7 to 13 July 2026. Nobody opened a hospital this week. Instead, the announcements were about...
- Weekly Digest Medical Tourism Records Concentrate In Penang And Seoul This is the Health Tourism News roundup for the week of June 29 to July 7 2026. Malaysia and South Korea both reported record medical tourism figures this...
- Weekly Digest Nigeria, Iran And Seoul Redraw Medical Tourism This is the Health Tourism News roundup for the week of 24 to 30 June 2026, and it read less like a sales pitch than a stocktake of leaks. Nigeria wants its...
- Weekly Digest Health Tourism As Badge, Escape Hatch And Disguise This Week In Health Tourism 16.06.26 - 23.06.26. Three governments spent the week calling medical tourism a pillar of national economic strategy, while a...
- Weekly Digest This Week In Health Tourism 08.06.26 - 15.06.26 This is the Health Tourism News roundup for the week of 8 June 2026, and the clearest signal across it is that the contest in medical tourism has moved past...
- Weekly Digest This Week In Health Tourism 31.05.26 - 07.06.26 This is the Health Tourism News roundup for May 31–June 7, 2026. This week's signals highlight a dual trend: destinations are aggressively pursuing growth in...
- Medical Tourism Querétaro Medical Tourism Hub to Open in 2027 A US$145 million medical district in Querétaro, Mexico, is due to open in 2027, aiming to make the city a medical tourism hub for North American patients.
- Medical Tourism Korea Medical Tourism Nears 2 Million Foreign Patients Korea's medical tourism sector is projected to reach 2.01 million foreign patients in 2025, its first year above two million since tracking began in 2009.
- Medical Tourism Medical Tourism Risks For American Patients American patients chase cheaper surgery abroad, but medical tourism carries clinical, legal and continuity-of-care risks that the headline savings can hide.