Growth of Medical Tourism Industry

Growth of Medical Tourism Industry

Medical tourism is actively promoted in a lot of nations. Amongst these countries are South Africa, Greece, Jordan, Philippines India, Singapore and Malaysia. India has recently entered into the field of medical tourism. There has been a study conducted by McKinsey and the Confederation of Indian Industry which has found that medical tourism in India could become a $1 billion business by 2012.

The Apollo group in India singly has thus far treated 95,000 international patients. Apollo is at the topmost when it comes to medical tourism in India and attracts patients from Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East. The group runs a hospital in Sri Lanka and manages a hospital in Dubai.

The group has tied up with various hospitals in Tanzania, Mauritius, Yemen and Bangladesh Health Insurance Mauritius.

Escorts group of hospitals also claims to have doubled its number of overseas patients – from 675 in 2000 to nearly 1,200 this year. Lately, the Ruby Hospital in Kolkata got into a contract with the British insurance company, BUPA. There is a hope to get British patients from the queue in the National Health Services quickly.

Analysts have declared that 150,000 medical tourists came to India last year. The current market for medical tourism in India is mainly limited to patients from the South Asian and Middle East economies.

Afro-Asian people spend as much as $20 billion a year on health care outside their countries – out of this estimate Nigerians alone spend a probable $1 billion a year.

India’s medical tourism business is growing at 30 per cent a year and is predicted to generate at least US$2.2 billion a year by 2012. Singapore’s target is to attract one million foreign patients annually.

Together with strong growth in Asia’s other well-established medical health care markets, like South Korea and Thailand, the industry is set to boldly stride past US$4 billion by 2012.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *