In 2023, a multi-site hospital group engaged DGS to build what it did not have: a true international patient operation. The group was treating around 200 international patients a month across its facilities. Thirty-six months later, that figure exceeds 1,400 a month — a 7× increase — with DGS operating acquisition, telesales and end-to-end patient coordination as the group’s outsourced international department.
The starting point
The group had the clinical infrastructure of a market leader — accredited facilities, deep specialty coverage, senior physicians — but international demand was arriving passively, through referrals and fragmented agency relationships. There was no unified funnel, no consolidated CRM view of an international inquiry, and no accountability for what happened between first contact and admission.
What DGS operated
We built and ran the department end to end. Demand generation combined healthcare SEO, AI-answer optimisation and paid campaigns across the group’s priority source markets, all under the group’s own brand. A 24/7 multilingual patient desk handled every inquiry with enforced response-time SLAs; a single CRM tracked each case from first message to booked treatment and aftercare, eliminating leakage between marketing, coordination and clinical teams. Reporting moved from activity metrics to a monthly ROI statement per source market.
The results
Monthly international patient volume grew from 200 to 1,400+ — an annualised run-rate rising from roughly 2,400 to nearly 17,000 patients. Because growth was engineered market by market, the mix diversified as it scaled: no single source market dominates the group’s international revenue today.
Why it worked
Hospital groups rarely lack demand potential; they lack an owner for the full international funnel. Giving that funnel to one accountable operation — with the group’s brand on the front and DGS running every layer behind it — is what converted latent capacity into a 7× outcome.