Slashdot Mirror
India Woos Medical Tourists
aspelling writes "It's not only quality hardware and software that can be done in India for a fraction of the cost. BBC reports that India has a generation of world class doctors capable of doing joint replacement, heart, neuro and cancer surgery at their state-of-the-art facilities. Don't be surprised when your physician prescribes you a trip to Bombay. Indian officials are working hard with HMOs around the world to make this dream come true."
My mother went through angioplasty at the Escorts Heart Research Institute (New Delhi, India, http://www.ehirc.com/). Not only did the operation go smoothly, the total cost of the whole procedure (including stay, doctor's fee, consultations, actual procedure, angiography etc) came to under $4000. Out of this $2000 was for the medicated stent used, which is imported from the US.
(PS: This particular hospital performs over 20 angioplasties and around 8 bypass surgeries daily)
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I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don't know the answer.
Do I need to point out Bombay is called Mumbai? Sort of a Instanbul/Constantinople thing.
See this page for information.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
"What if I pick a bad doctor and he messes me up"
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In general the average India surgeon operates on many more patients than the US surgeon. It's simple, there are just that many more people in India, and far fewer surgeons. So the level of experience for common procedures is higher in India than in the US. If a medical procedure calls for a cyclotron and a super-computer - the Western countries are where THAT can be done. But a heart bypass - it's done routinely and successfully all the time.
I live in India. My daughter's life has once been saved by the India public (read free) health system. So I'm prejudiced in its favour.
Of course you can get excellent (if expensive) medical / surgical treatment in the US.
And of course some India doctors are venal and money-focussed.
But don't dismiss India doctors and India hospitals as a whole. On the whole they are very very good. And they are about as likely to skip legal consequences (if any) as a US doctor or hospital. Note - the judicial system in India does NOT have jury trials. So no little old ladies get awarded a hundred million when their nose jobs go awry. But there is adequate enforcement of accountability in medical practice.
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There are US hospitals which send their MRI images electronically to Indian companies which have a 24/7 staff of radiologists to interpret the images and send back the results. It is supposedly cheaper and faster according to a television show I saw, can't recall the show, it may have been on Tech TV. I do believe medical regulatory boards consisting of US doctors are going to make decisions which benefit US doctors. If the outsourcing trend became a major threat, I believe US doctors would employ some type of regulatory action to justify halting the trend. Doctors have had positions of status and wealth in the US for a long time and I don't think they are going to allow that positions slip away without a hard fight.
Ok, how is this: I am physics graduate student,
won't get PhD until I am 29 an until then I earn
less than 20K a year while working basically
every waking moment (about 14 hrs a day/ 7 days a
week). I will then be a postdoc for a few years
earning about 40K and then hopefully a professor
earning 70K or so. If all doctors worked as much as
I do and had pay schedules as low I do we'd have
more or less affordable healthcare.
You're woefully wrong when you talk about a lack of accredited facilities in India. I'm sorry to say, but it's apparent that you speak out of an unfound prejudice that discounts the quality of Indian medical institutions.
I've only recently returned from that country and how it is progressing. This Harvard Medical associated facility is just the first of many similarly affiliated facilites coming up all over the country. John Hopkins has associates in the Indian market too.. I just can't recall their names. And there may be so many more initiatives underway that I'm not even barely aware of.
Agreed that even all this infrastructure available today doesn't amount to much, but it's more that a step in the right direction for that country.
And more importantly, for those in developed countries that can't afford to pay the high-cost of private healthcare, India offers a teriffic option to get treatment at a fraction of that cost.