The first time I heard about US folks outsourcing their heart surgery or hip replacement to doctors in India or China, it sounded crazy. But clearly the rise of “medical tourism” — traveling to different countries to have a medical procedure done less expensively, more expediently, and in some cases more expertly — is on the rise.
So much so that foreign medical institutions and even countries, especially India, are marketing their services aggressively, and getting good results. Some health insurance companies are starting to reimburse their customers for medical procedures done abroad.
In a recent Harvard Business School case study, “Apollo Hospitals — First-World Health Care at Emerging-Market Prices”, Professor Tarun Khanna and colleagues explore the rise of this phenomenon and how institutions such as India’s leading Apollo Hospitals are catering to the demand.
In an interview, Khanna outlines several of the major drivers of medical tourism:
- Global travel is easier than it ever has been.
- Foreign doctors trained in the West are more likely to return to their countries to practice.
- The quality of medical training in places like India is reaching a very high standard, and medical facilities are first rate.
Other countries growing their medical tourism industry include Mexico, Brazil, Poland, Turkey, and Singapore. The demand has also underwritten creation of third-party providers such as Med Journeys that offer “all-inclusive” packages to these destinations complete with tours.
Khanna, who himself has traveled in the past for medical care, applauds the practice.
“At the end of the day we all ought to celebrate the development of these hospitals, because a lot of people who would have to wait in pain for 8 months for a hip replacement can get it tomorrow, at much lower expense. People with excruciating dental pain can get it fixed, cost effectively, much quicker. And patients who need a kidney transplant and have to be on dialysis can get attention sooner.”
What an interesting marketing challenge! Foreign doctors must convince Western patients to leave a country that many of us believe is home to the best health care in the world to travel tens of thousands of miles to a developing country we’ve never seen and put our lives in the hands of professionals we don’t know.
How would you meet this challenge?
