Designing for Healthcare Tourism

Riglys and Jam

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Riglys and Jam

7 min readMar 3, 2018

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Designing for Healthcare Tourism

My roles // UX|UI Design, Design Research, Interaction Design, Market analysis

Mozocare is a well curated marketplace that helps you find healthcare among the best hospitals across the globe.

Overview

Krish, a doctor and head of genetic lab in India, was working on his medical tourism platform in an offline manner. He approached us to design a user first experience when someone gets to know about the platform till he finds the suitable treatment.
Our goal was to consider the entire process — from the moment a patient searches for his treatment and finds a suitable cure to when he/she come backs as healthy person.

Problem

The main issue is in Underdeveloped Countries where there is not good enough access to Hospitals and doctors. It’s even difficult to diagnose the disease, let alone find and get effective treatment.
But at the same time, in Developed Countries, it becomes a big pain point because of the high cost of treatment.

To cut down the problems short :

Not able to diagnose and find effective treatment
Cost
Reliability/Trust

Our role

We coordinated and led all facets of design including: information architecture, user task flows, interaction, visual, product, and prototyping. I also conducted user research using methods such as interviews, Video calls and participatory design in order to address both user behavior and attitudes.

Design Process

User personas

User needs/goals

“Find and get effective treatment.”
“Lower cost or may be better health insurance policies.”
“High quality Healthcare.”
“Trust on Hospital and Doctors.”

User’s Journey

We identified the key specs that had to be included in the website in order to build the MVP, then mapped out user flows based on those specs (a lot of whiteboarding was involved). At this point in the process, we found participatory design to be extremely helpful. We actually had end users mapping out their ideal flows, which we were then able to incorporate into our design.

Based on the user flows, we constructed the information architecture such that there was a minimal level of difficulty to immediately accessing relevant information. After all, the goal of this product is to enable users to quickly and easily find treatment and send us inquiry.

Market Research

Global Medical Tourism Market was valued at $61,172 million in 2016, and is estimated to reach at $165,345 million by 2023, registering a CAGR of 15.0% from 2017 to 2023.

Medical tourism can be defined as travel across international borders with the purpose of availing medical treatment of some form, which may or may not be available in the travelers’ home country.
This treatment may include a wide array of medical services; however, the most frequently availed services include cancer treatment, orthopedic treatment, neurological disease treatment, elective surgery, fertility treatment, and others.

When geographical segments of the market are taken into consideration, Asia Pacific was spearheading the world market for medical tourism in 2016. It has been forecasted that India and Singapore would gain popularity as medical tourism destinations in Asia Pacific. Thailand accounts for lion’s share of the market revenue of medical tourism.
India and Thailand have been forecasted to witness substantial growth owing to improved healthcare infrastructure, increasing awareness about medical tourism and economic growth.

Medical Tourism Market By **Demographic**

Based on treatment type, it is divided into cardiovascular treatment, orthopedic treatment, neurological treatment, cancer treatment, fertility treatment, and others.

State of Medical Tourism in India

“Amongst these corridors of health, India has the second largest number of accredited facilities (after Thailand). The Indian Medical Tourism market is expected to grow from its current size of USD 3 billion to USD 7–8 billion by 2020,” Grant Thornton India’s National Managing Partner Vishesh C Chandiok said.

The country is witnessing 22–25 per cent growth in medical tourism and healthcare providers expect the industry will double to $6 billion by 2018 from $3 billion now.

Why India is such a huge market for Healthcare Tourism ?

The primary reason that attracts medical value travel to India is :

Cost-effectiveness : Treatment from accredited facilities at par with developed countries at much lower cost
Medical advancements :A growing compliance on international quality standards and availability of latest medical technologies. India has 28 JCI accredited hospitals.
Ease of Travel : The government has removed visa restrictions on tourist visas that required a two-month gap between consecutive visits for people from Gulf countries. A visa-on-arrival scheme for tourists from select countries has been instituted which allows foreign nationals to stay in India for 30 days for medical reasons
Language : Despite India’s diversity of languages, English is an official language and is widely spoken by most people and almost universally by medical professionals. In Noida, which is fast emerging as a hotspot for medical tourism, a number of hospitals have hired language translators to make patients from Balkan and African countries feel more comfortable while at the same time helping in the facilitation of their treatment

“The Medical Tourism Market Report: 2015 found that India was “one of the lowest cost and highest quality of all medical tourism destinations, it offers wide variety of procedures at about one-tenth the cost of similar procedures in the United States.”

What are the treatments that patient are seeking from India and from what demographics ?

The most popular treatments sought in India by medical tourists are alternative medicine, bone-marrow transplant, cardiac bypass, eye surgery and hip replacement. India is known in particular for heart surgery, hip resurfacing and other areas of advanced medicine.

Traditionally, the United States and the United Kingdom have been the largest source countries for medical tourism to India.
According to a CII-Grant Thornton report released in October 2015, Bangladeshis and Afghans accounted for 34% of foreign patients, the maximum share, primarily due to their close proximity with India and poor healthcare infrastructure. Russia and the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) accounted for 30% share of foreign medical tourist arrivals. Other major sources of patients include Africa and the Middle East, particularly the Persian Gulf countries.
In 2015, India became the top destination for Russians seeking medical treatment. Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and the National Capital Regionreceived the highest number of foreign patients primarily from South Eastern countries, with Chennai having come to be known as “India’s health capital”.

Medical tourists from Europe and the US come here for cosmetic surgeries that are not covered by insurance. “We do bariatric surgery at $6,000–8,000, while it costs around $15,000 in the US. Almost 15–20 per cent of our surgical patients are from other countries,” said Dr Sukhvinder Singh Saggu, practising laproscopic surgeon at Apollo Spectra New Delhi.

Major Healthcare providers in India :

Competitor Analysis

Major domestic competitors

Direct competitors :

Indirect competitor :

Major global competitors :

Notes :
- This was conducted by paras arya and Shivam Dewan while they were working at Team variance as UX designers.

Designing for Healthcare Tourism

Designing for Healthcare Tourism

Overview

Problem

Our role

Design Process

User personas

User needs/goals

User’s Journey

Market Research

State of Medical Tourism in India

Why India is such a huge market for Healthcare Tourism ?

What are the treatments that patient are seeking from India and from what demographics ?

Competitor Analysis

Sources

Published in Riglys and Jam

Written by Riglys and Jam