Improving medical tourism in India through digital healthcare aggregator model

Abstract

Over the last two decades, medical tourism has gained intense traction and is now a multi- billion-dollar industry. With a net value of US$ 3 billion, India was the third most successful medical tourist destination in 2015. Present trends indicate that medical tourism is likely to hit a market value of US$ 9 billion by 2022. This is due to the existence of advanced healthcare providers and quality healthcare facilities in the Indian medical field. This growth has been facilitated by the shortage of diagnostic services in emerging nations, and exorbitant costs of availing healthcare services in developed nations such as the USA and Europe, and longer waiting periods for availing treatment. A substantial percentage of visitors are primarily word-of - mouth publicity from tourists visiting India. The purpose of the project is to study the push and pull factors affecting the perceived quality of a medical tourism destination in order to develop an aggregator model for the medical tourism industry in India. The aggregator model is basically a multi-sided platform (MSP) business model for improving the attractiveness of India as a medical tourism destination. We studied these factors by designing a survey for people who have travelled abroad or most likely to travel abroad for seeking medical care. We further studied the perception of people towards the medical tourism facilitator (aggregator) and determined the factors which could be used to develop an aggregator model. The relation between the factors and the perceived quality of the medical tourism destination was found out using statistical analysis of the variables. The positively related factors were implemented for developing the business model for the multi-sided platform for facilitating medical tourism in India. A website prototype was also developed for visualizing the layout of all features desired by medical tourists.