Health tourism incentives: the digital spend file
Health tourism incentives: how to make digital marketing spend documentable — campaign segmentation, the paperwork set, and the measurement record.
By Roozbeh Nazari · CEO
Health tourism incentives cover how clinics can have their promotional and marketing spend abroad assessed within the scope of state support schemes. In practice, what these applications get stuck on is usually not the support itself but how the spend was documented: there is an invoice but which market it belongs to cannot be separated out, there is a campaign but the records do not show that its audience was abroad. This article explains the method for setting up your digital marketing spend so that it is documentable from the start. We collect the whole of the clinic-side digital setup on our clinics page.
Which legislation to consult
The framework for state support directed at service exports is run by the Ministry of Trade. According to the announcement from the Ministry's Directorate General of International Services Trade, Decision no. 10962, "the Decision on the Definition and Classification of Service Exports and the Support of Service Sectors", was published in the Official Gazette dated 27 February 2026, no. 33181, and entered into force. Health tourism is one of the service sectors that framework covers. The support items, rates, upper limits and application procedure are defined in that Decision and the circular attached to it; the current texts are published on the Ministry's service sector support page.
The second place to look is the permit and certificate side of the activity itself. The authorisation required by the Ministry of Health to carry out international health tourism activity also directly affects which statements you may use on the digital side; we covered that separately in the health tourism authorisation article. USHAŞ, within the Ministry of Health, also operates as the institutional point of contact on the international health services side.
Why this article gives no rates or upper limits
A significant share of the support-rate and upper-limit figures circulating online belong to regulations that have been repealed. Because the framework was renewed in February 2026, a table written against the old text has a high chance of being wrong today. So we quote no rate, amount or upper limit in this article: those numbers are defined in the Decision and its circular, they are updated from time to time, and what determines the outcome of your application is not a summary we relay but the text in force at the moment you apply.
The content here is not legal or financial advice; for your own application, take the Ministry's current legislation page and, where needed, a certified accountant as your basis. The contribution of this article lies elsewhere: whatever the support item, the way spend is documented almost always has to answer the same questions. If you build an arrangement that answers them from the start, you will not have to rebuild your file when the legislation changes.
Making digital marketing spend documentable
The basis of documentability is that every spend item can answer four questions with paperwork: who made this spend, for which service, which market was it targeting, and what was produced in return? The gap we encounter most often in clinics is the fourth one; there is an advertising invoice, but no archive showing with which creative, in which language and to which landing page that advertisement ran.
The arrangement that works in practice is set up like this. One folder is opened per campaign; inside it are the invoice itself, the spend breakdown from the platform, screenshots of the published visuals and copy, a screenshot of the targeting settings, and the landing page as it stood on that date. In work running through an agency, the platform spend breakdown must be attached behind the agency invoice; a one-line "digital marketing service" invoice does not show where the money went.
Fix the folder naming from the start: year, month, market code, language and service name. Six months later, sifting the relevant ones out of a hundred folders is only possible if the naming is consistent. The same arrangement also pays off during internal audits and agency changes.
The retention period and format for documents should be settled up front too. Historical data in platform interfaces does not sit there indefinitely; when an account closes, an agency changes, or the platform's retention window expires, a retrospective breakdown may no longer be obtainable. Exporting the breakdowns at period end into your own archive is therefore the one item that cannot be made good later. Likewise, keeping the landing pages as they stood on that date matters, because page content is updated after the campaign ends and the address shown during the application may by then display different text.
Campaign segmentation: market, language and service
Because the logic of the support is to reward activity directed abroad, the most critical axis of segmentation is the market. Separating campaigns by market from the outset is therefore far sounder than trying afterwards to divide one campaign's spend across countries. The same holds for language: gathering campaigns running in Arabic and Persian under separate campaign identities makes both reporting and documentation easier.
The third axis is the service. If a clinic's domestic patient acquisition spend is mixed in the same account with international patient spend, the separation becomes guesswork after the fact, and guesswork cannot be documented. Splitting domestic and international activity into different campaign trees when you set up the account structure is a ten-minute job on day one; done later it requires months of retrospective data cleaning.
The fourth axis of segmentation is time. Because support applications are assessed by defined periods, which period a spend belongs to has to be readable the same way from the invoice and from the platform breakdown. Differences between the invoice date and the advertisement's run date cause confusion especially in prepaid ad accounts; keeping a separate breakdown showing in which period the prepaid amount was spent closes that gap.
The measurement record that ties spend to outcome
The documentation side shows that the spend was made; the measurement side shows that the spend reached its intended audience. Neither substitutes for the other. The minimum arrangement to build on the measurement side is this: traffic from advertising tagged with campaign parameters, forms and messaging starts defined as conversions, country and language breakdowns being reportable, and those records exported and stored periodically.
Because most contact in health tourism runs through messaging apps, the break in that chain is usually between the advertisement and the conversation. We set out the method for building the chain in detail in the lead quality and attribution chain article; for how the patient coordinator's record ties to the appointment, see the CRM integration article. The aim here is not to promise an outcome; it is to be able to show, from your own records, which contacts the spend produced.
A self-check before applying
Before submitting the file, answer these questions against your own records. Can every invoice be tied to a campaign? Is the market each campaign targeted visible from the settings? Are the published creatives, as they stood on that date, in the archive? Are domestic and international spend separated? Is there a platform breakdown behind the agency invoices? On the measurement side, has an exported report covering the campaign period been kept?
If you can answer yes to all six, then regardless of which item the legislation supports at which rate, you have a file that can be reviewed. In our experience what delays applications is usually not the scope of the support but one of those six items being missing. Whether promotional copy complies with the regulations is a separate heading; we covered how to frame price and outcome statements in the medical tourism price pages article.