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India is measured the leading country promoting medical tourism-and now it is moving into a new area of "medical outsourcing," where subcontractors offer services to the overburdened medical concern systems in western countries.
India's National Health Policy declares that treatment of foreign patients is legally an "export" and deemed "eligible for all fiscal incentives extensive to export earnings." Government and private sector studies in India approximation that medical tourism could bring between $1 billion and $2 billion US into the country by 2012. The reports approximation that medical tourism to India is raising by 30 per cent a year.
India's top-rated teaching system is not only churning out computer programmers and engineers, but an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 doctors and nurses each year.
The largest of the predictable half-dozen medical corporations in India helping medical tourists is Apollo Hospital Enterprises, which treated an probable 60,000 patients between 2001 and spring 2004. It is Apollo that is forcefully moving into medical outsourcing. Apollo already provides immediately computer services for U.S. insurance companies and hospitals as well as functioning with big pharmaceutical corporations with drug trials. Dr. Prathap C. Reddy, the chairperson of the company, began conference in the spring of 2004 with Britain's National Health Service to work as a subcontractor, to do operations and medical tests for patients at a portion of the cost in Britain for either government or private care.
Apollo's business began to grow in the 1990s, with the deregulation of the Indian economy, which significantly cut the ceremonial barriers to expansion and made it easier to import the most modern medical utensils. The first patients were Indian expatriates who returned home for treatment; major venture houses followed with money and then patients from Europe, the Middle East and Canada began to arrive. Apollo now has 37 hospitals, with about 7,000 beds. The company is in partnership in hospitals in Kuwait, Sri Lanka and Nigeria.
Western patients usually get a package deal that includes flights, transfers, hotels, treatment and often a post-operative vacation.
Apollo has also reacted to criticism by Indian politicians by expanding its services to India's millions of poor. It has set aside free beds for those who cannot afford care, has set up a trust fund and is pioneering remote, satellite-linked telemedicine across India.
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