While doctors and nations across the globe were doing their best to combat the COVID-19 pandemic that kept throwing new curveballs at them every few months, other personal health emergencies suffered — and medical tourism took a hit, especially in India.
For Fortis Healthcare, medical tourism accounted for 10 percent of their business before the COVID-19 pandemic. "Now, in terms of quantum, it has come back to the levels it was before the COVID levels. But, we have seen a growth in domestic business and a result of that the percentage-wise it is still around 7-8 percent," said Ashutosh Raghuvanshi, MD & CEO, Fortis Healthcare.
He said he expects the figure to go up to around 12 percent over the next couple of quarters. "So we should see a very significant growth in the international medical value travel patients coming to the country," he said.
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Travel restrictions in the first two years of the pandemic had an adverse impact on medical tourism in India, said Dr P.S. Venkatesh Rao, an endocrine and laparoscopic surgeon based out of Bengaluru. “The restrictions were not just in India, but in the countries the patients were coming from as well. Even people from other parts of India were finding it hard to travel across the country when the restrictions and regulations were imposed,” he said. He, however, added that medical tourism in the country had slowly started to pick up, but would take some time.
According to estimates, the medical tourism market, which was valued at $6 billion in the 2020 fiscal year, is expected to more than double to $13 billion by 2026, PTI reported last month.
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Dr Sayan Paul, senior consultant oncologist at Apollo Multispeciality Hospitals in Kolkata, said patients usually come to India from countries such as Somalia, Tonga, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Kazakhstan, other African countries etc. He said people come to India for all sorts of treatment — oncology, cardiology, orthopaedic care, urology, etc. “Now things are slowly returning to normal,” he said.
Why India for medical tourism?
Dr Paul said India offers top quality treatment, at par with the treatment in the western countries of Europe as well as the US, and it is budget-friendly. “So the same quality care that you get there, you get in India for one-tenth of the cost. Not just the treatment, but the facilities as well — comfort, wards, ICUs, etc,” he said.
Many Indians living abroad also come back to India for treatment, even if they are living in countries that offer free healthcare. “In the countries that offer free healthcare, the patients have to wait for six to seven weeks for an appointment,” said Dr Paul.
Mohit, who has been living in Canada for around seven years, said healthcare is free for residents in the country, but it doesn’t come without its share of caveats.
“Free doesn’t necessarily cover a 100 percent of everything. For a lot of things you would often depend on insurance, such as eye care, dental treatment, etc,” he said.
He said when he got his two wisdom teeth removed, it would have cost him around Rs 60,000 if he did not have insurance, and if that was the case he would have preferred to wait until he came back to India to get it treated.
He also suffered ligament damage to his wrist. Even though the treatment for that was free, he had to wait four months to get an appointment. So he decided to get it treated in India, where he was also scheduled for a corrective arthritis surgery. “If the same surgery was scheduled in Canada, I would have probably have to wait for eight months to go through with it,” he said.
Government initiatives
Last month, the government chalked out a plan to augment the medical infrastructure in 17 cities that witness an inflow of many overseas patients for treatment and wellness therapies in order to boost medical travel as part of its ‘Heal in India’ initiative, as per a PTI report.
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The Health Ministry is also working on easing medical visa norms and other requirements for patients as well as their companions from 44 countries that are identified based on the number of patients visiting India, and the quality and cost of medical treatment there, PTI had reported quoting official sources.
Occupancy levels
Meanwhile, talking about the occupancy levels, Raghuvanshi said that for Fortis it has come to near normal. So is the case with the number of procedures, both in the domestic as well as international markets. "We expect some further growth in the international markets, though it has come back to pre-COVID levels, I must say," he said.
In the fourth quarter of the previous financial year, Fortis saw the numbers dropping significantly for both occupancy as well as procedures. "The occupancy numbers had come down to around 50 percent during January, which gradually recovered over the next two months. But now those numbers have come to around 67 percent, which is a tad lower than what it was pre-COVID levels," Raghuvanshi said, adding that they expect a normal ongoing occupancy of around 70 percent plus.
