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2014-08-11 14:00:11
Desperate call from Puer On New Year’s Eve
In Yunnan Province on February 9, 2013, the day before the Year of the Snake began, a sixty-year-old client suffered from respiratory failure due to pulmonary fibrosis and was immediately sent to the intensive care unit of the small city’s local hospital. Due to the lack of medical resources in the area, his family immediately contacted MSH China for evacuation to Beijing, where he lived and worked.
We started emergency preplanning once we received the call through the 24-hour hotline at our Shanghai headquarters. Our team soon contacted the client’s attending doctor and the emergency assistance company. After consulting with the attending doctor and based on our doctors’ professional medical opinions, we realized that the client should not be subjected to high altitudes. Thus, the best choice was for him to continue his treatment at the local hospital in Puer.
Throughout the New Year holiday, our case management team kept in touch with the client’s family and his attending doctor to closely monitor the patient’s condition. We also ensured that the emergency assistance company would be ready to evacuate in case his condition worsened.
Remote consultation between top Chinese medical experts
The patient did not show significant signs of improvement. We then asked respiratory specialists from Beijing to hold a remote medical consultation and develop a treatment plan for the client.
Although Union Medical College Hospital and Sino-Japanese Friendship Hospital specialists do not ordinarily provide remote medical consultation services, we convinced them to hold a remote video conference with the client’s family and his attending doctor. We provided the specialists with lab and radiology examination reports so that they could have a detailed discussion with the attending doctor and propose a treatment plan.
Unwavering support: Delivering medicines from thousand miles away
Unfortunately, only two of the six medications in the treatment plan were available in the local hospital. Fortunately, our medical team in our Beijing was able to provide the other four medications. Getting the medication to the patient in Puer was challenging and required multiple trips to the Beijing hospital and different modes of transport.
Fly to Beijing! Fly to Beijing!
The new medications controlled the client’s condition effectively, and he was cleared for air evacuation nine days later. We teleconferenced with the patient’s family and the emergency assistance company to answer any questions that they had. The patient was evacuated on the afternoon of February 26, with the emergency assistance company providing a professional ICU team to support his treatment. Within three hours, he arrived safely in Beijing and was taken by ambulance to Union Medical College Hospital. Our customer service staff was waiting to greet him and expedite his transfer to the ICU. His family, also waiting at the hospital, held back tears of joy upon his return, as they had feared the worst.
“Meeting your team was God’s best gift to me!”
After eighteen days of treatment, the client was discharged from the hospital. On the night before he was discharged, his company’s HR manager called us to say that she just received a letter from the family, thanking her for choosing MSH China. The manager said that she had never imagined an insurance service company would do that much for a client; and that it was a fortunate and a correct decision to choose MSH China.
On the day the client was discharged, our team received an email from his family, expressing his wife’s thanks for our support over the last month, without which he would not have received the best and most timely treatment. At the end of the email, the wife wrote, “Although I don’t believe in God, meeting your team was God’s best gift to me.”