Medical Tourism : Introduction

Table of contents

1.0 Introduction 2 1.1 Medical Tourism 2 2.0 Aims 3 2.1 Objectives 3 2.2 Scope of the study 3 3.0 Research Methodology 3 3.1 Data Collection 5 3.1.1 Primary Data 5 3.1.2 Secondary Data 5 4.0 References: 6

1.0 Introduction
1.1 Medical Tourism
Medical Tourism refers to movement of consumers to the country providing the service for diagnosis and treatment. The size of this market is estimated to be $40 billion based on a Saudi Report in 2000. During the past four years, the market grew at a whopping rate of 20-30% and is expected to grow further. Considering this growth the current market size is estimated to be $100 billion.
Medical Tourism industry offers tremendous potential for the developing countries because of their low-cost advantage. The advantages of medical tourism include improvement in export earnings and healthcare infrastructure.
Many people in westernised world are accustomed to visit other nations which can offer medical treatment and very economy rates. In other words high quality health care treatments can be best available abroad at a very affordable prices (Herrick, 2007). Medical tourism has been very popular among the nations like Thailand, Philippines, Malaysia, India, Cuba, South Africa, Singapore etc (Bookman, 2007).
In order to realize the full potential of the industry, it is imperative for these countries to develop a strategic plan for coordinating various industry players –the medical practitioners, private hospitals, policy makers, hotels, trans portation services and tour operators. This report presents the strategy that needs to be implemented by India, one of the key destinations for Medical tourism, in order to achieve industry-leadership. The reason for rapid growth of the medical tourism may be attributed to long waiting lists, opened channels for a high quality treatments etc (Carrera and Percivil, 2008).
The Medical Tourism Industry in India is poised to be the next big

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