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Medical Tourism Destination India:
India is considered the leading country
promoting medical
tourism- and now it
is moving into a new area of "medical
outsourcing," where subcontractors provide
services to the overburdened medical care
systems in western countries.
India's National Health Policy declares that
treatment of foreign patients is legally
an "export" and
deemed "eligible for all fiscal incentives
extended to export earnings." Government and
private sector studies in India estimate that
medical tourism could bring between $1 billion
and $2 billion US into the country by 2012. The
reports estimate that
medical tourism to India is growing by 30 per
cent a year.
India's top-rated education system is not only
churning out computer programmers and engineers,
but an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 doctors and
nurses each year.
The largest of the estimated half-dozen medical
corporations in India serving medical tourists
is Apollo Hospital Enterprises, which treated an
estimated 60,000 patients between 2001 and
spring 2004. It is
Apollo that is aggressively
moving into medical outsourcing. Apollo already
provides overnight computer services for U.S.
insurance companies and hospitals as well as
working with big pharmaceutical corporations
with drug trials. Dr. Prathap C. Reddy,
the chairman of the company, began negotiations
in the spring of 2004 with Britain's National
Health Service to work as a subcontractor, to do
operations and medical tests for patients at a
fraction of the cost in Britain for either
government or private care.
Apollo's business began to grow in the 1990s,
with the deregulation
of the
Indian economy, which drastically cut the
bureaucratic barriers to expansion and made it
easier to import the most modern medical
equipment. The first patients were Indian
expatriates who returned home for treatment;
major investment houses followed with money and
then patients from Europe, the Middle East and
Canada began to arrive. Apollo now has 37
hospitals, with about 7,000 beds. The company is
in partnership in hospitals in Kuwait, Sri Lanka
and Nigeria.
Western patients usually get a package deal that
includes flights,
transfers,
hotels, treatment and often a post-operative
vacation.
Apollo has also reacted to criticism by Indian
politicians by expanding its services to India's
millions of poor. It has set aside free beds for
those who can't afford care, has set up a trust
fund and is pioneering remote, satellite-linked
telemedicine across India.
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