Have you ever been on a vacation, gotten sick or hurt and didn’t know how to find a good doctor? Something that is not worthy of a trip to the emergency room, but does deserve medical care — perhaps a cracked tooth from a tasty treat, your child has a skin rash after a day out or an ankle that is a bit more swollen than any sprain you’ve had.
The truth is…the uncertainty of whether or not you should find a doctor is not a nice place to be in. The feeling isn’t pretty, it’s uncomfortable, it can be downright scary and the ultimate consequences of not seeking medical care OR receiving poor care can be much worse than we think.
And until now, existing solutions are travel medical insurance, heading straight to the ER or just dealing with it when you get home. Not too reassuring.
This limbo is exactly what happened in 2015 to Olaseni Bello, the founder of CarpeMed, and his wife . Then stationed in Germany, the couple were frequent travelers and always traveled with travel insurance. They headed to Tanzania, where the beauty of the sites, animals and culture were met only by the amount of mosquitoes they battled each day.
Unfortunately, one of the mosquitoes that bit Olaseni’s wife was carrying the Chikungunya virus. The symptoms of the virus can range from fever, fatigue and body/headaches to more extreme and dire reactions, with early diagnosis and remedy being a week’s worth of rest and appropriate medicines.
The 2 local doctors they found through their travel insurance provider both misdiagnosed her symptoms as nothing more than dehydration and climate change. Her symptoms grew worse and soon thereafter, they cut their trip short and returned to Germany. Upon landing, they went straight to a tropical doctor, but their concerns were again swiftly dismissed and told to drink more water and sleep it off. That night, the pain became more severe, unbearable and they headed to the ER, where it took 2 spinal taps to reveal meningitis.
The missed diagnosis and subsequent treatment delay led to 2 years of followup care and medical bills. This fueled the creation of CarpeMed, a Travel Medical GPS solution that makes it easy for travelers to find the best medical care that speaks their language.
It did not make sense that having and paying for travel insurance would still result in such a bad situation. A competent local doctor should have been able to better identify a local virus to provide an appropriate diagnosis. Olaseni wanted to ensure that overseas travelers would not have to go through situations like this anymore and actually have a travel medical option that works.
CarpeMed is a new and upcoming travel healthcare mobile application and platform that is specifically developed for travelers that no longer want to risk traveling without any travel medical solutions. The mobile app allows you to easily search through an exclusive shortlist of high quality medical providers and also create shareable health records and medical directives, which make sure your medical preferences are followed. It even has an “SOS” function that immediately calls local emergency services (did you know that there are 3 or 4 ‘911’ numbers in Paris, France, with #15 being the right one for medical needs?!) and user-selected travel (emergency) contacts.
The company and product has done all the hard work of filtering through the entire countries and cities’ worth of medical providers to make it easy for travelers to find doctors prior to travel or in the moment of need. Members have access to 10 different medical practice types, including general medicine, dental, eye doctors and OBGYN to name a few.
We found out that most travelers (94%) do not travel with any travel medical options, because they are unaware of the options or find travel insurance too costly. In reality, the financial pressures travel insurance providers deal with focus their priorities on expanding network coverage and increasing revenue, rather than making sure their users can easily find high-quality care.
While a long list of doctors is provided, it’s hard and frustrating to identify who to go to and uncertain quality of care remains. That said, this should not be a surprise, because this is typically what insurance is all about — hedging against the worst possible situation, but often not serving and providing value for more common needs.
When I spoke with Olaseni, he shared, “Our mission at CarpeMed is for travelers to ‘Travel Confidently’. We know they have taken the time and hard earned money to make their trip happen, the last thing they need is for something unexpected to spoil it. We’ve solved that and can get them to the care they need when they want it.”.
CarpeMed was created pre-Covid-19, and the global pandemic has made a travel medical safety net solution even more appealing. While Covid-19 is top of mind for everyone, most travel medical needs fall into every other category and the issue of easy travel medical access has been around for a very long time.
For those that believe in travel (most of us) and the history of how society overcomes challenges, return to travel is not a matter of “if”, but “when”. In the last few weeks alone, Mexico has received over 300,000 international visitors, we’ve seen Turkey become a Covid test hub for those that want to make their way around the world, and since relaxing quarantine guidelines just a few days ago, Hawaii has already seen 16,000 visitors.
The need and desire to explore and discover will not go away, so accepting new travel and destination guidelines is just something we will all get used to. That said, solutions are needed to provide peace of mind and power the “return to travel”. To further assist, CarpeMed will also be providing the most useful and bottomline Covid-19 information as part of their simple, traveler-first, cost-effective travel medical solution.
Currently, as of the release of this article, CarpeMed counts Mexico, Costa Rica, Thailand, Greece, Cyprus, Dominican Republic, and many other Caribbean islands as part of their initial locations. They have focused on locations that are warmer and closer for USA based travelers and for most, are already welcoming travelers back.
CarpeMed membership will be available for download early next year, iOS first on the Apple App Store, then Android on Google Play Store soon thereafter. There will be an annual ($120) and monthly ($12.50) option, with an annual membership being the best value for frequent travelers (2 or more times/year). However, most members will be gaining free access through their workplace benefits packages.
Cost and/or uncertainty should no longer be a hurdle to travel medical peace of mind and knowing where to go is step 1 in travel planning.
To learn more about CarpeMed, please visit: www.carpemedtravel.com
For general inquiries, business development and partnership opportunities, please feel free to contact: discover@carpemedtravel.com
https://www.instagram.com/carpemedtravel/
https://www.twitter.com/carpemedtravel
https://www.facebook.com/carpemedtravel/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/carpemedtravel/
