Medical Tours in India

Price Comparison between treatment in india and in your home Town

Indians, NRIs and tourists from around the world are beginning to realize the potential of modern and traditional Indian medicine. Indian hospitals and medical establishments have also realized the potential of this niche market and have begun to tailor their services for foreign visitors. At a regional geo-political level, this nascent industry came to limelight with the arrival of 'Baby Noor' from Pakistan, who came by the Indo-Pak bus service and got a red-carpet treatment at hospital in Bangalore. Several Indian state governments have realized the potential of this 'industry' and have been actively promoting it. Visitors, especially from the west and the middle-east find Indian hospitals a very affordable and viable option to grappling with insurance and National medical systems in their native lands. Many prefer to combine their treatments with a visit to the 'exotic east' with their families, killing two birds with one stone.

With internationally recognised healthcare professionals, holistic medicinal services and low cost of treatment, India can attract over one million health tourists every year, according to industry body CII. The country offers a unique mix of indigenous systems such as yoga, ayurveda and meditation and western medicinal systems like allopathy. This, along with world class experts and the cost advantage, can help attract over a million patients and earn $5 billion every year, a CII release said.

While a heart surgery costs $30,000 in the US, it costs $6,000 in India. Similarly, a bone marrow transplant costs $26,000 here compared to $250,000 in the US, the release said adding that India should leverage its competitive strength to promote medical tourism.

About 1.5 lakh patients had come to the country last year and the chamber along with Indian Healthcare Federation is working with tour operators for promoting packages to attract more medical tourists. CII and IHCF would also suggest a list of reputed hospitals in major cities with details of service and an indicative uniform price band in major specialities, it said. This would facilitate foreign patients seeking treatment in the country, the release said.

"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."

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.

In addition to patients from other developing countries, top Indian hospitals derive a significant share of foreign business from people of Indian origin who live in developed countries but maintain close ties to their homeland. But the same hospitals now are starting to attract non-Indian patients from industrialized countries, and especially from Britain and Canada, where patients are becoming fed up with long waits for elective surgery under overstretched government health plans.

Click here for Reservation