Given the ancient practices such as Yoga and Ayurveda, India is slowly growing into one of the most preferred medical tourism destinations in the world. Low treatment cost in the country is a major reason fuelling this rapid growth. However, there is a misconception among general public that India occupies only a minor share of the world medical value travel market, but this is not the actual scenario. Shaaz Mehmood, Director, Medijourn, explains, "In countries like Thailand, Korea and Turkey, medical tourism is popular in the form of elective procedures, primarily cosmetic. In countries like the UK, USA, Singapore and India, Medical Value Travel involves tertiary care & complex specialties including transplants, oncology, neurosurgeries, among others. The global market share estimates are based on monetary dollar value and India features low because of the cost value proposition it offers to its patients. Therefore, while the number of tertiary medical travelers to India is the highest in the world, our price offering, which is almost 50-90 percent cheaper, is the reason our market share shows lesser. It is a good problem to have!".

A serial entrepreneur with interests in food processing, restaurants and medical manufacturing, Shaaz wanted to do something in the healthcare segment, and seeing the vast opportunities medical tourism presented, he, along with his partner Ishaan Dodhiwala, incepted Medijourn in 2019. They approached Apollo Hospitals and offered to streamline the entire process of handling foreign patients' arrangements for them and thus became the primary MVT strategic partner for Apollo Hospitals across India. Today, it is one of India's largest medical travel companies in terms of number of queries and patients handled and organized tertiary care gross monetary value driven to the Apollo Group.

Medijourn takes care of the patients' end-to-end travel experience, right from getting their reports analyzed by the specialist to selecting the hospital location of their choice, travel & accommodation arrangements, and a lot more. The company has also partnered with hospitals abroad such as Medicana in Turkey and Bumrun grad in Thailand which are leading hospitals for medical tourism in their respective regions. Medijourn gets patients mainly from three sources firstly, through referring clinicians, partner offices, insurance companies or corporates secondly through digital sources where patients search for information and approach them directly or the hospital and thirdly, through the Government Treatment Abroad Committees who sponsor the patient's treatment. Additionally, ensuring seamless communication between the referring clinicians and the caregivers, the company also has a query management system called MediSupport which facilitates hassle-free communication between the patients, the referring doctor and the hospital they select.

Medijourn takes care of the patients' end-to-end travel experience, right from getting their reports analyzed by its partner hospital's doctors to selecting the hospital of their choice travel & accommodation arrangements and a lot more

"Till date we have handled close to 100,000+ queries and facilitated over 35,000+ patients from 141 countries. Some highlights through our journey included facilitating our key partner in Myanmar and Bangladesh to get in multiple chartered flights with patients during covid lockdown, and of course when our clinician completed 100 pediatric liver transplant procedures from the Philippines earlier this year. Medijourn was also part of the UAEIndia joint delegation to Tanzania and Kenya for enhancing healthcare partnership and was led by the Addl. Secretary of Health Govt. of India Lav Agarwal", Shaaz further explains.

Owing to such fine practices, Medijourn has recently been accredited by NABH and is now a 65 people strong organization. Going forward, the company has aggressive action plans in place to open 25 more offices worldwide in the next two years and foray into the Middle East and CIS regions as well. It shall also partner with key hospitals in global medical tourism territories. It is also building a system for post continuum of care for the medical travellers.

"Our aim is to make India one of the most preferred Medical Travel destinations in the world. By 2030, it is our vision to cater to one million medical travel passengers worldwide and further build our company as an employee centric organisation. We are aggressively working towards streamlining and organising this very fragmentic industry", concludes Shaaz.