What does the future look like for the medical travel industry? It’s a question that McKinsey & Company has been looking at for the past eight months, says consultant Ceani Guevara, who worked on a report with colleagues Tilman Ehrbeck and Paul D. Mango.

“There didn’t seem to be a lot of facts on the market, so we thought it was important to develop a real fact base [so we] could shed some light on [it],” Guevara says. McKinsey defines medical travelers as people who travel exclusively for the purpose of receiving medical care. The firm researched data from more than 20 countries on four continents for “Mapping the Market for Medical Travel.”

One key determination McKinsey made, however, is that there are fewer travelers than previously thought. “The market today is significantly smaller than conventional wisdom suggests. And most of today’s medical travelers seek high quality and faster service, not lower costs,” Guevara says.

McKinsey divided the medical travel population, which Guevara says consists of about 60,000 to 85,000 people, into four categories: those who wanted better care in spite of added cost (32 percent), those who wanted quicker access to care (15 percent), those who wanted lower costs for a medically necessary procedure (9 percent) and those who wanted lower cost for an elective procedure (4 percent).

One place where Guevara says she sees the room for the most growth is the U.S., where rising healthcare costs are motivating U.S. citizens to look for alternatives. Guevara says right now only about 5,000 to 10,000 Americans are taking this option, but by her figures, that could increase to 500,000 to 700,000. “That’s a 100-fold increase, and you’re looking at savings on the order of 20 billion dollars for the U.S. contestable insured medical travel market. That’s a lot of money.”