Low Costs Lure Foreigners to India for Medical Care; Escorts, Apollo, & Fortis Lead Vanguard
By Sanjay Sharma, Section Gurgaon News
Posted on Thu Apr 07, 2005 at 06:53:20 PM EST
Europeans and Americans, looking for world-class treatments at prices a fourth or fifth of what they would be at home, are traveling to India, Thailand, Singapore and other places. "Health is an emotional issue; it's not like buying a toy or a shirt made abroad," said a health care analyst, Gautam Kumra, who is based in New Delhi. "Nevertheless, you cannot deny the power of economics."
One doctor in India held up as first rate is Dr. Naresh Trehan, a cardiac surgeon based in New Delhi and the executive director of Escorts Heart Institute and Research Center. In the Gurgaon suburbs of New Delhi, Dr. Trehan is building a $250 million multispecialty hospital modeled after the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, USA. "We're gearing up, and the doors of Indian hospitals are wide open to the Western world," Dr. Trehan said. In the same neighborhood will be Fortis Healthcare's Medicity, a 43-acre hospital complex for foreign patients, which will have special immigration and travel counters and interpreters, with the idea of branding itself the Johns Hopkins Hospital of the East.
Dr. Trehan, 58, who studied cardiac surgery at the New York University School of Medicine and worked there for a decade, returned to India in 1988 to open his own cardiac hospital in New Delhi. The hospital now conducts 4,000 heart surgeries a year with 0.8 percent mortality rates and 0.3 percent infection rates, on par with the best of the world's hospitals. - About 150,000 foreigners visited India for medical treatments in the year ending in March 2004, the Confederation of Indian Industry, said.
- That number was projected to rise by 15 percent each year for the next several years.
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In the last four years, the Apollo Hospital chain, which has 18 hospitals throughout Asia, has treated 43,000 foreigners, mainly from nations in southern Asia and the Persian Gulf. Last year, 7 percent of its 5 billion rupees ($114.9 million) in revenue came from medical services provided to foreigners. Still, some hospitals in India are discovering that affordable costs and foreign-trained doctors may not be enough to make India a global health care destination. The country's dilapidated airports, garbage-strewn streets and overcrowded slums can put off even the hardiest foreigners.
For some foreigners, like George Marshall, a 73-year-old violin restorer from Yorkshire, England, India's hospitals also offer speedier treatments.
- Last year, Mr. Marshall said that he started having trouble finishing a round of golf. An angiogram showed two blocked arteries in his heart. After an Internet search and a chance meeting with a businessman who had gone to India for surgery, Mr. Marshall traveled to the Wockhardt Hospital in Bangalore in southern India last winter. His surgeon, Vivek Jawali, had trained at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. The men chatted about British politics and Dr. Jawali gave Mr. Marshall his cellphone number and said that he was available 24 hours. A surprised Mr. Marshall said that in the British health system, "you are just a number, but here you are a person." Travel expenses included, the surgery cost him £4,500 ($8,400).
For instance, radiologists working for Wipro, a software and information technology company based in Bangalore, analyze X-rays and scans from United States hospitals for a fraction of the cost. A diagnostics firm, SRL Ranbaxy, based in New Delhi, tests blood serum and tissue samples from British hospitals. Health specialists say that sending patients to India for treatment is not as unthinkable as it was 20 years ago.
From Star News Online - April 07, 2005
Low Costs Lure Foreigners to India for Medical Care
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