The Tico Times has published a lengthy article about the successes of medical travel and tourism in Costa Rica. The article features Prisma Dental patient Sheila Liner and quotes Prisma Dental international patient coordinator Tiffany Kofroth.

It concludes:

After some 15 years of problems with her teeth, Liner said she made the right choice.
“When I got off the plane, my friend Wendy from work, who went to pick me up at the airport, was crying,” she said. “It was just an amazing change. It’s totally like a face makeover.”

Liner even managed to afford to do some sightseeing after her dental work was complete, a trend the non-medical sectors of the tourism industry are banking on. However, Boucher, who founded Companion Global Healthcare, said tourism is more realistic for dental tourists than for more serious health patients.

“(For) most patients traveling outside of the country for something like a hip replacement or a heart valve replacement … going on a zipline through the rain forest is really not in your forefront,” he said. “But on the dental side, it is.”
That’s just what Liner did, she said, though she could not recall exactly where her tour guide took her. To Liner, all that mattered was that she “got to do ziplines through the canopy of a rain forest in Costa Rica!”

Companion Global HealthCare is a subsidiary of BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina. Prisma is a preferred dental provider for the company’s medical tourism plan.

The Tico Times article is not available online. It describes Prisma Dental and medical tourism as a bright spot for Costa Rica in the midst of the troubled economy.

Liner, who received treatment in late November from Dr. Telma Rubinstein of Prisma Dental in the western San José neighborhood of Rohrmoser, is one of more than 20,000 estimated medical tourists to visit the country last year, in a growing sector that consistently stands out as a bright spot in the country’s flagging economy. While the United States continues to struggle to cover its more than 300 million citizens with health insurance, countries such as Costa Rica are learning to capitalize on a growing outsourcing trend. As many as 70 percent of Prisma Dental’s patients are from the United States, according to Tiffany Kofroth, the clinic’s patient coordinator.