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Medical Tourism (also called medical travel, health tourism or global healthcare) is a term initially coined by travel agencies and the mass media to describe the rapidly-growing practice of traveling across international borders to obtain health care.

Such services typically include elective procedures as well as complex specialized surgeries such as joint replacement (knee/hip), cardiac surgery, dental surgery, and cosmetic surgeries. As a practical matter, providers and customers commonly use informal channels of communication-connection-contract, and in such cases this tends to mean less regulatory or legal oversight to assure quality and less formal recourse to reimbursement or redress, if needed.

Leisure aspects typically associated with travel and tourism may be included on such medical travel trips. Prospective medical tourism patients need to keep in mind the extra cost of travel and accommodations when deciding on treatment locations.

A specialized subset of medical tourism is reproductive tourism, which is the practice of traveling abroad to undergo in-vitro fertilization and other assisted reproductive technology treatments.

The motivation for medical tourism is in no particlular order of importance; cost, ready access and quality of procedure and setting.

Medical care sought outside your home country, could expose you unfamiliar ethical and legal issues. The limited nature of litigation in non-western countries is one reason for the lower cost of care overseas. While some countries currently presenting themselves as attractive medical tourism destinations provide some form of legal remedies for medical malpractice, these legal avenues may be unappealing to the medical tourist.

If unsatisfactory problems arise, patients might not be covered by adequate personal insurance or might be unable to seek compensation via malpractice lawsuits. Hospitals and/or doctors in some countries may be unable to pay the financial damages awarded by a court to a patient who has sued them, owing to the hospital and/or the doctor not possessing appropriate insurance cover and/or medical indemnity. New insurance products has become available recently that protect the patient should an alleged medical malpractice occur overseas.