ST. LOUIS-There's a good reason why medical tourism is hot these days: the cost, or lack thereof. One source recently told Healthcare Real Estate Insights that he travels to Paris periodically for a certain treatment.

“I can fly to Paris, spend a few days there, get my treatments, and the whole trip, including my flight, hotel, food, and payment for the procedure costs less than getting the same treatment here in the States,” he says. “And my treatments are actually performed by the world's leading practitioner in the field.”

With patients such as these in mind, a well-known U.S. provider has teamed up with a well-known foreign medical tourism entrepreneur on an eventual $2 billion project in the Cayman Islands – called Health City Cayman Islands – aimed at attracting patients from the United States.

St. Louis-based Ascension Health Alliance, the for-profit venture of not-for-profit St. Louis-based Ascension Health, and Dr. Devi Prasad Shetty, founder of Narayana Hrudayalaya Hospitals of India, continue to make progress on the construction of and planning for its interesting and eventually massive “health city” on Grand Cayman Island.

According to Health City Cayman Island officials, the project is under way and scheduled to open its first facility, a 140-bed hospital, in early 2014. Over the next 15 years, multiple phases would be added to the 200-acre site on Grand Cayman. The hospital, for instance, will eventually have about 2,000 beds. Also planned are an educational facility, a biotech park and an assisted living community.

Making the story even more intriguing is the fact that leaders of the two partnering companies have publicly stated quite dissimilar goals for the end product. In a story in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2012, Anthony Tersigni, president and chief executive of Ascension Health Alliance, states: “We're not considering this a medical tourism facility. That's not the intent at all. I'm not sure we're going to have US patients at the Caymans.”

But Shetty, founder of the alliance's partner, says in his own statement: “Cayman Islands is an hour flight from the US, and we intend to offer cost-effective treatment for the citizens of the U.S. and also (those) who are under-insured.” Other statements consistently note that the health city plans to offer “quality, low-cost healthcare services.”

And officials with Health City Cayman Islands issues the following statement: “The multi-specialty center of excellence will provide services not widely available in the region such as open-heart and bypass surgery, angioplasty, heart-valve replacement, cancer treatment, and organ transplant.”

No matter what this project's purpose, the Caymans sure sound like a nice warm place to go for healthcare services.

John Mugford is the Editor of Healthcare Real Estate Insights™, the nation's first and only publication totally dedicated to covering news and trends in healthcare real estate development, financing and investment. For more information, please visit www.HREInsights.com.