Is India prepared for global medical tourism boom?

Dr S K Bichile

In recent years, India is being seen as an important player in the globally growing "Medical Tourism", which is projected as a new segment in travel and healthcare business. The former Indian finance minister Jaswant Singh envisaged to make India a "Global health destination" and the budget tabled by him included government policy for collaboration between the available medical expertise in the country and tourism industry.

In simple words, medical tourism provides state-of-the-art private medical care in collaboration with tourism industry to patients from other countries at highly competitive price when compared to those prevalent in the western countries. The CII- McKinsey report mentions that the medical tourism market has been growing at the rate of 15 per cent for past five years and by 2012, Rs 10,000 crore will be added to revenues of the private players. Globally, medical tourism is said to be USD 40 billion industry and analysis available project that people from Afro-Asian countries spend as much as USD 20 billion every year on healthcare services from outside their countries.

Foremost, amongst the current private players, in medical tourism are hospitals in the Apollo chain. Main destinations are Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore and Hyderabad. These cities have private hospitals with medical expertise that can offer world class healthcare that costs one fifth to one tenth of the cost in US or Europe depending on the intervention required.

In addition to above destinations, the country has many cities with advanced medical facilities making India, a country with tremendous potential to capitalise on to increase its earnings to more than USD 1 billion annually and create hundreds of thousands new jobs in many sectors. This projection excludes earnings from other products included in the wellness tourism meant for rejuvenation of body and mind, eg herbal therapy, naturopathy, yoga, aromatherapy, reiki, music therapy which does not require advanced medical expertise.

India is relatively new entrant into this field and it has to prepare to face the already existing competition from other Asian countries, namely Thailand, Malaysia and Singapore. These countries together currently attract as much as ten times more medical tourists than India. Hongkong and South Africa are emerging as big medical tourism destinations. The countries that are actively promoting medical tourism include Israel, Jordan, Thailand, Malaysia, Cuba and Costa Rica. Other countries including Greece and Croatia plan to be attractive healthcare destinations.

The trends in this new-founded tourism product are encouraging. However, there is an obvious lack of any conscious and well-founded efforts to market medical tourism by our country. The crucial partners in this industry include central government ministries of finance, tourism, health and medical entrepreneurs, tourist industry and insurance companies.

In many countries, medical tourism is promoted by the government's official policy, which facilitates effective working of medical entrepreneurs and tourist industry to attract medical tourists. We need to go further in context to medical tourism in India's National Health Policy 2002.

The apprehensions expressed by some sections that "systematic development of medical tourism will boost up earnings by catering to the wealthy foreigners and Indians working in the foreign countries but it may adversely hit the low income population" need to be addressed for gaining approval of political opinions with varied views on liberalisation. From past ten years, India has entered a phase in medical expertise that is considered on par with international standards. This is because of high quality doctors and medical entrepreneurs who developed hospitals with required infrastructure and management style. Some of these hospitals have marketing departments to increase visibility and acceptance of their products in some countries.

They have got some success in overcoming prejudices of foreign patients about healthcare in developing countries. However in the current scenario, there is urgent need to streamline array of activities involved in the making India "Global health destination". We require urgent formulation of policies and procedures by top level in the government and also co-ordination of activities of partners required to play key roles to ensure that India uses its strength in medical field to get global financial benefits.

The writer is professor and head, department of haematology, T N Medical College and BYL Nair Hospital, Mumbai. Email: skbichile@vsnl.net