The German health care sector starts to heat up. A very interesting player is www.arzt-preisvergleich.de. Their business model: get patients to post the offers they have received from one doctor or dentist for treatment on their site and allow medical professionals to submit better offers.

The service is free for patients. It is up to the patients to choose an offer from those submitted by the participating doctors. Savings between the original quote received by the patient and the lowest on-line offer is usually around 50%.

Very interesting is also the fact that the service is recommended by the national health service. Quite unthinkable really, just a few years ago. Any connection to medical tourism? Well, we always said, in the end medical tourism will force the Western health care systems to reinvent themselves. Could this be a first sign that things are moving? Or have there been other signs, which I missed because I am luckily not exposed to the European health care system anymore?