Quietly Transforming the Medical Tourism in India

Mr. Abhik Moitra, President of High Beam Global is quietly transforming the Medical Tourism Industry in India. The industry which is just in its infancy has many ills which need immediate correction. While the hospitals in search of easy patients care little for these aspects, High Beam Global under Mr. Moitra has turned the concept on his head. Read an indepth coverage by our correspondent Dr Shubham Dhankar.

Mr. Abhik Moitra who started his career in a completely different segment of Banking shifted to Healthcare only in the year 2008 when he became incharge of the Fledgling International Business department at Artemis Health Institute. He had no time for indoctrination and was straight away pushed into achieving steep targets. The easier way out would have been to bring in a large number of facilitators but Mr. Abhik knew that it was a short term game and therefore went on to build a formidable team which started building the Artemis Brand in the target countries. Slowly but surely Artemis started attracting patients from many countries including US. His team’s excellent management of the patients at the hospital earned them many word of mouth patients.

Being a sharp marketer, Mr. Abhik quickly realized that it was not financially feasible for each hospital to go to so many countries and market their services. It was not only costly but would require a very big team to achieve this goal. He moved on to form High Beam Global, a company which develops the international patient travel market in association with the hospitals. Today they are working with some of the best names in the Indian healthcare industry. The hospitals love this kind of arrangement because they do not have to hire a big team and at the same time they are able to increase their reach to several countries. High beam global takes care of the networking and other logistical arrangement in those countries while the hospitals provide the medical manpower in terms of doctors to organize conferences and OPD’s.

In the last 5 years, Mr. Abhik Moitra’s rise has been meteoric because of his deep understanding of not only the Healthcare Industry but also the International patient travel. He has been a great team man and some of his proteges are now heading the international patient departments at several hospitals.

In an exclusive interview with our Chief Editor, Mr. Moitra stressed the fact that the government needs to realize the potential of Indian healthcare to emerge as the leading destination for the travelling patients. Today India gets about 8 lac patients and generates precious foreign exchange of USD 800 million. This is expected to touch 32 lac patients generating close to USD 2 Billion. This is far more important in its impact because the amount of import content in the healthcare delivery is very negligible except the import of implants.

The problem of poor infrastructure is that the patients coming to India spend only on getting the treatment and do not holiday in India. Our competition is with countries like Thailand where the treatment is almost 40-50 % expensive than India but has far better infrastructure for mixing tourism with treatment.