The chairman of India’s second largest hospital chain, Fortis Healthcare, Harpal Singh, talks about how “medical value travel” is a better term to describe what is happening in India rather than “medical tourism.
He says that cardiac surgery costs 90 percent less than in the USA due to a number of reasons. He said the Cleveland Clinic takes four years to build a new cardiac facility but Fortis built a similar facility in 18 months in India; the lower cost of capital invested results in savings for patients. The operating theaters at Fortis can turn around far more procedures per day than an average western medical facility: this is due to better efficiency, longer hours in the day for utilization of expensice facilities and other issues of scale. Singh says that doctors in India are paid very highly but Fortis does have far lower costs than entities in the West as far as support staff.
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