India Fosters Growing 'Medical Tourism' Sector
Ray Marcelo
The Financial Times, 2 July 2003
India is promoting the
"high-tech healing" of its private healthcare sector as a tourist attraction.The government hopes to encourage a budding trade in medical tourism, selling foreigners the idea of travelling to India for low-cost but world-class medical treatment. Naresh Trehan, executive director of Escorts Heart Institute and Research Centre, a leading private healthcare provider, says India has established world-class expertise in practices such as cardiac care, cosmetic surgery, joint replacements and dentistry. Merging medical expertise and tourism became government policy when finance minister Jaswant Singh, in this year's budget, called for India to become a "global health destination". If foreigners respond, a new medical tourism industry could be generating revenues of Rs100bn ($2.1bn, €1.9bn, £1.3bn) by 2012, according to a report by McKinsey Consultants and the Confederation of Indian Industry, a business group. There is no doubt that the Indian medical industry's main appeal is low-cost treatment. Most estimates claim treatment costs in India start at around a tenth of the price of comparable treatment in America or Britain. For example, in April
Madras Medical Mission, a Chennai-based hospital, successfully conducted a complex heart operation on an 87-year-old American patient at a reported cost of $8,000 (€7,000, £4,850) including the cost of his airfare and a month's stay in hospital. The patient claimed that a less complex operation in America had earlier cost him $40,000. Other procedures such as diagnostic services offer significant cost-savings. Take the rising popularity of "preventive health screening". At one private clinic in London a thorough men's health check-up that includes blood tests, electro-cardiogram tests, chest x-rays, lung tests and abdominal ultrasound costs £345 ($574, €500). By comparison, a comparable check-up at a clinic operated by Delhi-based healthcare company Max Healthcare costs $84.
"In a corporate hospital, once the door is closed you could be in a hospital in America," says P.V.R.K. Prasad, director-general of the Dr Marri Channa Reddy Human Resource Development Institute. Vishal Bali, vice-president of Wockhardt Hospitals, points out as proof of quality that the US private health insurers Blue Cross and Blue Shield insure patients treat-ed at his group's hospitals. The British health insurer Bupa also insures the costs of treatment at Wockhardt hospitals. Mr Bali adds that Wockhardt is in talks with Britain's National Health Service about outsourcing the treatment of British patients to India. According to Hari Prasad, vice-president of Apollo Hospitals in Hyderabad, foreigners should have confidence in India's medical system because many Britons and Americans are accustomed to being treated by expatriate Indian doctors. In any case, most private healthcare providers hold modest ambitions about which foreign patients would come to India seeking treatment. For instance, of the 5,200 hospital beds run by the Apollo hospital group, about 100 beds are usually occupied by foreign patients, mostly from the Middle East, Africa and countries of south Asia. Indeed, demand for medical tourism is most likely to come from among the 20m-strong Indian diaspora, says Deep Kalra, chief executive officer of travel agency makemytrip.com. Mr Kalra says wealthy first- and second-generation expatriate Indians are aware of the rise of India's high quality, low-cost hospitals. He estimates there is a potential market of some 12m expatriate Indians who would combine regular visits to India and save time and money by undergoing non-emergency procedures such as eye operations, dental work, cosmetic surgery and knee surgery. Mr Kalra's agency plans to launch a medical tourism package later this year. Still, some remain sceptical about medical tourism's potential. Sumanjit Chaudhry, an executive at India's Max Healthcare group, says:
"I imagine if someone is sick and ill they won't want to have a holiday. You'll hardly see a guy who comes here for heart surgery leaping off and going to the beach."
Source :
yaleglobal.yale.edu
Surgeries, Side Trips for 'Medical Tourists'
Affordable Care at India's Private Hospitals Draws Growing Number of Foreigners
By John Lancaster
Washington Post Foreign Service
Thursday, October 21, 2004; Page A01
NEW DELHI -- Three months ago, Howard Staab learned that he suffered from a life-threatening heart condition and would have to undergo surgery at a cost of up to $200,000 -- an impossible sum for the 53-year-old carpenter from Durham, N.C., who has no health insurance.
So he outsourced the job to India. Taking his cue from cost-cutting U.S. businesses, Staab last month flew about 7,500 miles to the Indian capital, where doctors at the Escorts Heart Institute & Research Centre -- a sleek aluminum-colored building across the street from a bicycle-rickshaw stand -- replaced his balky heart valve with one harvested from a pig. Total bill: about $10,000, including round-trip airfare and a planned side trip to the Taj Mahal.
"The Indian doctors, they did such a fine job here, and took care of us so well," said Staab, a gentle, ponytailed bicycling enthusiast who was accompanied to India by his partner, Maggi Grace. "I would do it again."
Staab is one of a growing number of people known as "medical tourists" who are traveling to India in search of First World health care at Third World prices. Last year, an estimated 150,000 foreigners visited India for medical procedures, and the number is increasing at the rate of about 15 percent a year, according to Zakariah Ahmed, a health care specialist at the Confederation of Indian Industries. Eager to cash in on the trend, posh private hospitals are beginning to offer services tailored for foreign patients, such as airport pickups, Internet-equipped private rooms and package deals that combine, for example, tummy-tuck surgery with several nights in a maharajah's palace. Some hospitals are pushing treatment regimens that augment standard medicine with yoga and other forms of traditional Indian healing. The phenomenon is another example of how India is profiting from globalization -- the growing integration of world economies -- just as it has already done in such other service industries as insurance and banking, which are outsourcing an ever-widening assortment of office tasks to the country. A recent study by the McKinsey consulting firm estimated that India's medical tourist industry could yield as much as $2.2 billion in annual revenue by 2012.
"If we do this right, we can heal the world," said Prathap C. Reddy, a physician who founded Apollo Hospitals, a 6,400-bed chain that is headquartered in the coastal city of Chennai and is one of the biggest private health care providers in Asia. The trend is still in its early stages. Most of the foreigners treated in India come from other developing countries in Asia, Africa or the Middle East, where top-quality hospitals and health professionals are often hard to find. Patients from the United States and Europe still are relatively rare -- not only because of the distance they must travel but also, hospital executives acknowledge, because India continues to suffer from an image of poverty and poor hygiene that discourages many patients. Taken as a whole, India's health care system is hardly a model, with barely four doctors for every 10,000 people, compared with 27 in the United States, according to the World Bank. Health care accounts for just 5.1 percent of India's gross domestic product, against 14 percent in the United States. On the other hand, India offers a growing number of private "centers of excellence" where the quality of care is as good or better than that of big-city hospitals in the United States or Europe, asserted Naresh Trehan, a self-assured cardiovascular surgeon who runs Escorts and performed the operation on Staab. Trehan said, for example, that the death rate for coronary bypass patients at Escorts is 0.8 percent. By contrast, the 1999 death rate for the same procedure at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, where former president Bill Clinton recently underwent bypass surgery, was 2.35 percent, according to a 2002 study by the New York State Health Department.
Escorts is one of only a handful of treatment facilities worldwide that specialize in robotic surgery, which is less invasive than conventional surgery because it relies on tiny, remote-controlled instruments that are inserted through a small incision.
"Our surgeons are much better," boasted Trehan, 58, a former assistant professor at New York University Medical School, who said he earned nearly $2 million a year from his Manhattan practice before returning to India to found Escorts in 1988.
Source :
www.washingtonpost.com
The Hindu Business Line : India eyeing share in medical tourism pie
Hyderabad 10 May 2006
Nice blend of top-class medical expertise at attractive prices is helping a growing number of Indian corporate hospitals lure foreign patients, including from developed nations such as the UK and the US.
If a liver transplant costs in the range of
Rs 60 lakh-70 lakh in Europe and double that in the US, a few Indian hospitals, such as Global in Hyderabad, have the wherewithal to do it in around
Rs 15 lakh-20 lakh. Similarly, if a heart surgery in the US costs about Rs 20 lakh, the Chennai-headquartered Apollo Hospitals Group does it in roughly
Rs 2 lakh.
As more and more patients from Europe, the US and other affluent nations with high medicare costs look for effective options, India is pitted against Thailand, Singapore and some other Asian countries, which have good hospitals, salubrious climate and tourist destinations.
While Thailand and Singapore with their advanced medical facilities and built-in medical tourism options have been drawing foreign patients of the order of a couple of lakhs per annum, the rapidly expanding Indian corporate hospital sector has been able to get a few thousands for treatment.
But, things are going to change drastically in favour of India, especially in view of the high quality expertise of medical professionals, backed by the fast improving equipment and nursing facilities, and above all, the cost-effectiveness of the package, said some of the hospitals Business Line spoke to.
Source :
www.thehindubusinessline.com 
