Before you travel
Ask these before you pay anyone
Three practical references: the questions to ask before money moves, how payment reaches the hospital safely, and which records to send.
Independent patient coordination. Zero markup on your hospital bill. Not medical advice.
1. Before you pay anyone: the checklist
Ask us these questions. Ask any hospital the same ones, and any other coordinator. A party that will not answer reasonable questions in writing before payment has already answered the only question that matters.
Who will actually treat you
- Which hospital, and which department? The full name — "a Grade 3A hospital in Beijing" is not an answer.
- Which named doctor will be in charge? Ask for the name, and how it is written in Chinese.
- What is their practising registration number? China publishes a public registry of physician licences, and you can check it yourself. A licence proves someone may practise. It says nothing about how well.
- How many of my procedure do they do each year? This is one of the few quality signals you can actually obtain.
- Who signs the written treatment plan? The diagnosis, the proposed procedure, the expected stay and the follow-up plan should be signed by the treating doctor or department — not drafted by a coordinator.
What the price includes, and what it does not
- An itemised breakdown, not a total. Surgery and anaesthesia, ward and nursing, implants, tests and labs, medication, follow-up — line by line. A single total hides the surprises.
- What pushes the cost up? Complications, a longer stay, a changed implant, ICU, extra consultations — and roughly by how much.
- What is your service fee? Flat or a percentage of treatment? What does it cover, and what is charged separately? Interpreting, airport pickup, accommodation?
- What is excluded? Flights, visa fees, accommodation and meals, travel insurance, medication to take home, follow-up after you return.
- Who receives the money? Ask for the legal name of the payee and its bank. If the payee is a coordinator rather than a hospital, ask why.
- Can I pay the hospital directly? Paying the hospital directly is the safest structure there is, and it is our rule.
Refusal, cancellation and refunds
Get the refund terms in writing before you transfer anything, in a language you could rely on in a dispute.
- The hospital refuses my case — after review, or after I arrive. What happens to money already paid, and how quickly is it returned?
- I cancel. How much is refundable at each point in time? Hospital charges follow the hospital's rules; the service fee follows ours — they are separate.
- Treatment stops part-way. Is the unused hospital balance returned, and who decides?
- Who holds the money in the meantime, and in whose name?
Outcomes, risk, and what happens after you fly home
- Realistically, what is the outcome for someone like me? Not the best case — the complication rate for patients of my age and history at this hospital, and how they define success.
- What are the main risks, including those that would extend the stay or require a second operation?
- If something goes wrong after I am home, who do I contact — which time zone, which language? Can the hospital send my records to my own doctor? Ask for a named clinician, not a general mailbox.
- How soon can I fly after surgery? Ask for the minimum stay for my specific procedure, and for the symptoms that would rule out boarding.
Your coordinator, your language, your records
- Who is my named coordinator — direct contact, and working hours in my time zone? Who covers when they are off?
- Which languages do they speak, at what level? Is the medical interpreter formally trained, or whoever is free that day?
- Where are my records stored, who can open them, how long are they kept, and can they be deleted? Ask before you send, and send only what the hospital actually needs.
| Get a written answer before you pay | Received |
|---|---|
| Hospital name, department, treating doctor and registration number, annual case volume | ☐ |
| Itemised estimate, what increases it, the service fee, and what is excluded | ☐ |
| Who is paid, whether the hospital can be paid directly, and the refund terms | ☐ |
| The written treatment plan and who signed it, plus realistic outcomes and main risks | ☐ |
| Post-return complication plan, your named coordinator, and where your records live | ☐ |
2. Payment and money safety
This section is about one thing: how money reaches the hospital, and how it does not get taken from you on the way.
The rule: treatment costs are paid only to the hospital. A cashier window, the hospital's official payment QR code, or a transfer to the hospital's corporate account. Anyone asking you to send a "deposit" to a private account is, with rare exceptions, running a scam.
Public hospitals bill patients directly and issue receipts through their finance department. Money paid to a hospital leaves an official seal, an itemised invoice and a traceable record. Money routed through a coordinator inserts a private party between you and that invoice — and if something goes wrong, there is no invoice to void. A coordinator paid a percentage of your bill also cannot give neutral advice about which hospital to use or what treatment to have.
What Chinese hospitals actually accept
China is close to cashless, and many hospital windows do not take foreign credit cards. Set up two payment routes before you fly, not one.
- Alipay (international version) — link a foreign Visa or Mastercard. Per-transaction limit around RMB 50,000, currency conversion around 1.5%.
- WeChat Pay (overseas visitor) — passport verification required, default daily limit around RMB 6,000, raisable with verification. Set it up in advance, not in the queue.
- UnionPay — foreign-issued UnionPay cards work at large hospitals. Other card networks generally do not.
- Physical Visa / Mastercard — usually only at international departments or private hospitals. Until you have it confirmed in writing, assume it does not work.
- Large bills — transfer to the hospital's corporate account against a payment notice, and check that the account name matches the hospital's name.
Invoices, deposits and pre-authorisation
Get a hospital receipt for every payment. The final one should be the formal medical invoice (发票): hospital name, patient name, itemised charges, amount, invoice code and number, and the special invoice seal. Most are now electronic. Insurance claims depend on it, so keep it.
Inpatient care requires an upfront deposit (预交金), paid to the hospital against a receipt, topped up if it runs low, and settled at discharge. A deposit is not a fee to "hold a theatre slot" — it is simply prepayment for your stay. Where insurance is involved, the hospital can open the account against a pre-authorisation, but the money still goes to the hospital.
Six signals of a deposit scam
Any one of these on its own should stop you:
- A "holding deposit" to reserve a particular surgeon's operating slot.
- A request to send money to a personal account, or a company account whose name does not match the hospital's.
- Pressure to pay without a hospital document — no registration record, no admission notice.
- A price quoted only in a chat app, with no hospital letterhead naming a department.
- Refusal to name the hospital or the department; vagueness the moment you ask about the campus.
- "Refundable once the hospital confirms" — in practice that confirmation never arrives.
Verify the department yourself, before you transfer
Never let the party asking for money be the one who verifies. Find the hospital's main switchboard on its official website or verified account, ask to be put through to the international department or the department that quoted you, and confirm two things: that this doctor practises there, and that this procedure is performed there. A real department confirms in minutes. A scam depends on you never making that call.
If you have already paid
- Stop all further payments immediately, and preserve the chat logs, the quotation and the transfer receipt.
- Contact your bank the same day and ask whether the transfer can be recalled or reversed.
- In China, call 110 and keep the case number.
- Then call the hospital's international department and check whether an appointment or admission actually exists. Often it does not.
Cross-border recovery is slow, and a transfer you authorised yourself is the hardest of all to reverse. That is why "money goes only to the hospital" matters more than any remedy afterwards.
3. Records: what to send
With complete records, a hospital can usually complete its assessment within days. One missing file often means the decision is postponed.
The short version: send everything, keep it in the original language, and always send the images themselves — not just the reports.
| Document | What it must contain | The usual mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Discharge summaries | Every admission, in date order | Sending only the most recent |
| Operative notes | Procedure, findings, implants, complications | Substituting the billing list |
| Pathology and immunohistochemistry | Grade, stage, margins, receptors and markers, molecular tests | Omitting the original biopsy |
| Imaging reports | The radiologist's report for every study | Assuming the report replaces the images |
| Lab trends | Serial values with dates and units | Sending a single result |
| Medication list | Generic names, doses, frequency, start dates | Brand names only |
| Allergy list | The substance, and what happened | Writing "no allergies" without checking |
Two more things are worth preparing: a one-page timeline of the illness, and implant details (brand, model, serial number) in case revision surgery is on the table. The name on the records must match your passport.
Why DICOM is not a PDF or a JPG
DICOM is the image itself. A JPG is a photograph of one view of it. A PDF report is one radiologist's opinion about it.
DICOM carries measurement data: far greater bit depth than a photograph, plus slice thickness, spacing, acquisition parameters and patient position. With that, a surgeon can measure a lesion, a radiation oncologist can contour a target, and a radiologist can compare tissue density. A JPG has been lossily compressed and frozen to one window and level — whatever another window would have shown is already gone, and lesion margins are exactly what compression damages most.
Send the images, not the reports; send the series that show change, not only the latest study. A report is someone else's conclusion and a single study is an isolated frame. Whether a lesion is growing, shrinking or stable is a comparison — so send the baseline, the interim studies and the most recent one, and send the original biopsy pathology rather than only the post-treatment specimen.
How to export it, and how to send it
Ask the imaging department for the raw DICOM data — disc, USB stick or download link, not printed film and not the report. Bring ID; collecting on someone else's behalf requires written authorisation. Open it yourself with a free DICOM viewer to confirm it is complete: discs are occasionally mis-burned or missing a series.
- How big it gets. A single-region CT is commonly several hundred MB. A PET-CT can exceed 1 GB. Multi-sequence MRI plus years of history can reach tens of GB. Hospital download links often expire within days — download immediately and keep two copies.
- How to transfer it. Use an encrypted cloud folder or a secure transfer service with an expiry date, and send the password through a different channel.
- Ordinary email is the wrong channel. It is not end-to-end encrypted and attachment limits are typically 20–25 MB. If the recipient accepts only email, send an encrypted archive and communicate the password separately.
Translation: what to translate, and what never to replace
We translate discharge summaries, operative notes, pathology and immunohistochemistry reports, imaging reports, medication lists, lab tables and the timeline.
What must never happen is replacing the original with the translation. The original is the legally valid record. Drug names, doses and units can shift in translation; grade, stage, receptor status and gene fusions have to be exact; and if a number is transcribed wrongly, only the original can show it. Keep both, named by language and date.
A working translation for a consultation is not the same thing as a certified translation, which some hospitals and insurers require. Establish which one is needed before paying for certification.
Privacy: encrypted channels, and ask first
This is the most sensitive material you have — genetics, HIV status, mental health, fertility. Send it through encrypted channels, and ask five questions directly: where is it stored, who can open it, how long is it kept, does it cross borders, and how is it deleted? Get the answers in writing. Anything not relevant to treatment can be redacted: ID numbers, policy numbers, home address.
Ready to start your health journey?
Send us your records and tell us what you are trying to solve. A coordinator replies within one business day with a proposed hospital, a named specialist, and a written cost range — before you pay anything.