An Interview With Erich Johanning, Co-Founder Of Care Overseas

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Below is our recent interview with Erich Johanning, Co-Founder of Care Overseas:

Q: For those who haven’t heard of it, what is the best way to describe Care Overseas?

A: Care Overseas is like a medical tourism facilitator but on steroids. We not only help patients from the United States, Canada or the United Kingdom find the best doctors in Costa Rica for their procedures, we’ll help them plan their whole trip.

Our main interest is that patients can feel secure and confident of getting their medical procedures done in Costa Rica, because we, as local experts know who are the best and which clinics are the best, as well as which cities or neighborhoods to stay in and what to do. Our goal is to help international patients receive high quality medical treatments at a much lower cost, and we can do this thanks to our local knowledge and expertise, and medical alliances.

We are currently offering dental consultation services, but will be expanding to other medical services in the near future.

Care Overseas is based in Costa Rica, but we’ll soon be opening an office in Buffalo, New York.

Q: You have taken dental tourism to a whole new level. How did you get the idea for such kind of a service?

A: We believe that everybody deserves access to affordable and great healthcare, and in the case of dental procedures, we believe that everybody deserves to smile. We know how expensive medical and dental procedures are in countries like the United States. And we know that many patients are seeking healthcare services abroad, such as Costa Rica, due to our excellent bilingual professionals and our beautiful country. However, we understand that planning a trip is hard and planning a medical trip is harder, which can get overwhelming.

When patients are planning their medical trips, they need to not only do an extensive research on the doctors and clinics, but they must also figure out where they are going to stay, how they are going to move around, what they are going to do, and many other small but important details.

That’s where we come in to help. We wanted patients to enjoy their trip planning and feel confident and secure that we will only recommend the best of the country.

Travelling abroad to get a medical procedure is a risk in itself, unless you have the expert recommendations of a local company such as ours.

Q: What makes you the best choice out there?

A: We provide our patients three very important things that makes us the best option in the industry. Trust, Value and Local Expertise

Why Trust?

We are not clinics so we don’t promote ourselves as the best clinic. Instead, we pre-select clinics, so we are sure we are only offering patients the best of the best.

Also, we don’t charge clinics to be in a list or to get ranked in a list. We don’t even offer advertising.

Why Value?

Our website is full of information about our clinics, ourselves and detailed information about all procedures.

We don’t hide anything to our patients, we share everything. We also give our patients all the assistance they need. Not just a recommendation of a good clinic. We help and guide our patients in every step of the way.

Why Local Expertise?

We are Costa Ricans, we know the country, we know the clinics and we know the doctors.

We better than anybody know who is the real deal. We know where to go, what to do and who to go with. We recommend doctors and clinics that we ourselves go to.

Q: How exactly does your platform work?

A: It’s simple. Patients contact us through our website or by phone and they tell us in detail what procedures they need, and when they would like to come. We’ll ask for a lot of details to be able to provide patients with the most accurate quote, we might ask for a treatment plan from their doctors back home, or x-rays, CT scan images, etc.

With that information we’ll create a quote for our recommended clinics. Once the patient has chosen a clinic and agreed on the quote, we’ll set up appointments with the clinic for the days the patient would like to come.

We will also coordinate transportation from and to the airport, and if needed from and to the clinics. We will also book any activities or tours the patients would like to do while on their spare time in the Country.

Q: Can any dentist work with Care Overseas? Do they have to meet some standards?

A: Definitely no. We are convinced that there are many good dentists in Costa Rica, but we have a specific set of standards we want our clinics to meet. The dentists we recommend must:

Be US-trained doctors
Have in-house lab and technology
Have a bilingual staff
Be members of their respective professional board in the United States
Work with only high quality materials

Q: What can we expect from Care Overseas in the future?

A: We eventually want to offer more health procedures to our patients. Our goal is to offer full care to people overseas. But first we want to make sure we are giving all the attention and service to our patients in need of dental procedures.

As mentioned before, we will probably open up an office in Buffalo, New York in search of not only more patients but business alliances.

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