JCI (Joint Commission International)

JCI, Joint Commission International, is the overseas arm of the organization that accredits American hospitals. Since 1999 it has surveyed hospitals in more than 70 countries against standards written to match what a U.S. hospital must meet: infection control, surgical safety checklists, medication management, credentialing of doctors, patient rights and quality reporting. A JCI-accredited hospital has passed an on-site survey by clinicians and administrators and is re-surveyed every three years.

For anyone thinking about care outside the United States, JCI is the first filter. There are roughly 1,000 JCI-accredited hospitals worldwide, concentrated in places that have built medical travel into their economies: Mexico, Costa Rica, Colombia, Turkey, India, Thailand, Singapore, the United Arab Emirates and Spain among them. A JCI hospital in Cancun or Bangkok performs a hip replacement, a bariatric sleeve or a cardiac bypass with U.S.-trained or U.S.-equivalent surgeons, and publishes a package price that includes the surgeon, the anesthesia, the hospital stay and follow-up: often $8,000 to $15,000 for a joint replacement that would cost $40,000 to $70,000 in a Texas hospital. Accreditation does not make a hospital the best in its country, and it does not cover the trip home; complications after travel are the real risk to plan for. But it does mean the hospital meets a standard that most American patients would recognize.

The takeaway: if you are considering care abroad, only look at JCI-accredited hospitals, verify the accreditation on JCI's own website, and get the all-in package price in writing with the follow-up period included.