Medical Assistance

24-Hour Emergency Referral Service via our own Medical Team. Services under this category are as follows:

• Emergency Medical Consultation and Support Medical practitioners, specializing in emergency medicine, are on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, to provide your insured client with medical support when the need arises.
• 24-Hour Medical Referral Assistance with referral to a hospital or medical facility, dentist, physician or pharmacy.
• Medical Monitoring in case a client is hospitalized. A doctor of ours will maintain contact both with you and the attending physician.
• Medical Repatriation/Evacuation Service in case an evacuation is necessary. We will make all the arrangements to repatriate your injured/highly ill patients, as soon as they are medically able to be moved, either on a commercial or private aircraft with the appropriate medical escort. Evacuating from a remote island or place with insufficient primary health facility to an adequate medical provider, is one of our strengths. We always strive to achieve the fastest, safest, and less expensive means of transportation, regardless the time of the day or the geographical difficulties.
• Return of Mortal Remains in the event of death. We will coordinate the repatriation of the remains.
• Guarantee of Hospital/Medical Expenses in case a client becomes hospitalized. We will forward a letter of guarantee to the hospital, covering all reasonable charges related to the hospitalization.
• Liaison with a Family Physician. Parsival Medical Assistance will act as a liaison point with the client’s family physician, relatives and/or friends, if the medical emergency warrants it.

Cost Containment

If well-controlled, medical costs in Greece and Cyprus can be among the lowest in Europe, even in private doctors and in-patient facilities.

Cost containment is integrated at all stages of the process:

• Before: Selection of Preferred Providers, price agreements, steerage
• During: Monitoring of the case, transfers if necessary
• After: Audit of all invoices

Included in the steerage is ensuring presentation of the EU EHIC card, whenever the patient is in a public facility. When the patient is in a private facility, which has an agreement with Greek insurance companies, Parsival Assistance will attempt to use the EHIC which can be used for the services paid by the state depending on the diagnosis.

For private in-patient facilities, Parsival Assistance has a price agreement in place, specifying what is the agreed prices per service and what is the prompt payment discount. Our staff has personally visited all hospitals in Greece, and we maintain excellent relationships with all providers of private medical services. As a part of our research, we have established that there is typically a different pricelist for tourists depending on their nationality. The Nordic and German travel insurance companies receive the lowest prices and the British insurances the highest prices. Any case handled by Parsival will be to the prices already established for the Nordic markets.

It is also a part of the protocol, that procedures that may seem irrelevant for foreign doctors, but they are requested in the protocols in Greek public facilities, will be allowed. This can be a series of X-rays prior to surgeries that may not be required in the Nordics or in the UK, but it is a part of the teaching in Greek universities. Examples from the past have shown, that if there is a dispute coming to court, the Greek courts will rule in favor of the protocol/norm.

For most outpatient cases, all visits, emergency medicine, drugs and injections provided by the doctor are included in the flat fee or category fee.

All invoices are checked against the price agreements and the specific medical notes on the case. A line-by-line audit is performed.

Parsival Assistance has an agreement with most providers to inform them if there are nonplayable amounts due to errors in billing or over-examination costs not relevant for the diagnosis. All inpatient cases are reviewed by medical consultants as well.

Parsival Assistance handles more than 10.000 cost containment cases per year and there are rarely any balance billing situations. We have a long experience and well-established connections to the providers who know and accept that the payment presented by Parsival on behalf of the clients, is fair, appropriate and in due time. This is relevant, as many providers complain that they do not receive payment on time from other cost containment companies.