Asia’s economic growth and an expanding middle class have fuelled strong demand for medical tourism in Asia, tapped by key players such as Singapore.
The small city-state is considered a pioneer in the lucrative medical tourism industry and has built up a strong image for itself as a provider of high-quality medical treatments, including sophisticated surgeries such as liver transplants.
The government has gone all out to develop the industry with a network of not just high-quality hospitals and clinics that are able to cater to foreign patients but also drug manufacturers and biomedical research laboratories owned by big foreign pharmaceutical manufacturers that have rushed to set up a presence here in recent years.
Droves of foreign patients from around the region, including government leaders and high-ranking officials, flock here seeking medical treatment. Most of them come from Malaysia and Indonesia, but also more recently from more distant places such as the Middle East and Russia.
But competition in the medical tourism industry has been heating up, with more Asian countries also starting to promote medical tourism and vying for a slice of the pie. These include Thailand, India, Malaysia, the Philippines and newcomer South Korea.
The latest available data from the Singapore Tourism Board shows that visitors who came to Singapore for medical treatment or related reasons grew 13 percent to 646,000 in 2008 compared to a year earlier.
That number includes 370,000 visitors who came here for medical treatment. Another 230,000 are family members of the patients who accompanied them here. All in all, that generated revenues of S$1.9 billion (about $1.5 billion) for the economy.
”We do see a growing trend,” said Tan Yen Nee, deputy director at the Singapore Tourism Board. ”We want to position Singapore as a high-quality healthcare destination well known for advanced medical care.”
In contrast, official data show that in 2007 India received 450,000 medical tourists, in 2008 Thailand 1.4 million, and in 2009 Malaysia 340,000, the Philippines 100,000 and South Korea 60,000.
Medical tourism is not exactly new to Singapore. The city-state’s private hospitals have attracted wealthy patients from neighboring Indonesia for the last 30 to 40 years, way before ”medical tourism” was even heard of.
The medical tourism industry in Asia emerged and exploded only in the last decade, reflecting global trends, the lower cost of air travel and most of all, Asia’s expanding middle class, who can better afford to pay for quality medical treatment overseas which might be lacking in their home country.
In particular, the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States prompted Middle Eastern tourists who used to seek treatment there to turn to Asia after facing immigration problems to enter the United States, resulting in private hospitals in Singapore seeing a jump in patients from the Middle East.
Around 2003, the Singapore government began to promote medical tourism, seeing it as having the potential to become one of the country’s economic pillars. It established a website in that year as a collaboration between several government agencies and major healthcare providers, offering a convenient source of information for foreigners seeking medical treatment in Singapore.
Singapore has pursued a strategy of combining high-quality medical care with the development of its pharmaceutical industry and biomedical research and development. Besides some 15 hospitals here, which are well geared to treat foreign patients, the government has aggressively pushed for major foreign pharmaceuticals to establish operations here while luring top doctors and scientists from all over the world to work here.
One of Singapore’s attractions is that despite the high quality of medical treatment offered here, the cost is much lower than in Western countries. Singapore’s medical cost is estimated to be just about 35 percent of that in the United States. For example, the cost of knee surgery in Singapore is one-fifth that of the United States.
Being a small city-state, with a population of about 5 million, Singapore sees the medical tourism industry as a way to help boost the overall standard of medical care here due to economies of scale. In fact, the medical industry forms a small part of an even bigger effort to create a biomedical industry.
”Most other countries are driven by tourism receipts or medical receipts as a primary objective for promoting medical tourism, but for us it is slightly different,” said an STB official.
”Singapore’s medical tourism is part of the total economy of health care. The primary driver is to take care of our own people,” she said.
The private hospitals in Singapore have also expanded overseas. For instance, the Parkway Group, a dominant player in the local private healthcare business, is also riding on the back of the rise of Asia’s middle class.
”We have opened up the Middle East market, the Indian market, the Russian Far East market and some of the markets in Indo-China,” said the official.
”We are looking at the upper middle class,” said Tan See Leng, chief executive officer of the Parkway Group, in a recent interview. ”So whenever there is a band (of middle class) forming, those are the markets that we think we have the maximum opportunity.”
Besides its three hospitals in Singapore, which are well known for their quality both locally and overseas, it has also ventured out to run other hospitals or clinics in the region, such as India, the Middle East, China and neighboring Malaysia. The company has 37 marketing offices all over the world.
”Our revenues per year exceed S$1 billion in recent years,” he said. ”We think that the market will grow with education, with earning power, and rising affluence.”
The company has a multi-national team of about 1,500 doctors at its three Singapore hospitals, a good portion of them being top specialists in their fields who are able to conduct ultra-complex surgeries.
Under the company’s unique business model which doctors find attractive here, the doctors buy and own their office premises within the hospitals, where they can meet their patients before admitting them into the wards for surgery.
With its sheer number of doctors, it is able to provide first-class treatment to patients with much less waiting time compared to other hospitals.
Source: Quotemedia