'Global insurance cover may help rise medical tourism': Apollo Hospitals' Sangita Reddy

Bangkok: Once insurance companies start covering treatment expenses for foreign patients coming to India, medical tourism numbers could shoot up exponentially, a top Apollo Hospitals official has said.

"Global insurance companies enabling international usage automatically... and not just enabling... (but) encouraging will help save (patients) a lot of money," Apollo Hospitals joint managing director Sangita Reddy said.

Speaking to PTI on the sidelines of the Garmin Health Summit in Bangkok, Reddy said, "We have requested the government to lead us on a delegation to work with the insurance companies. If they start covering... then you will see a large segment of the Western world coming here".


"We have a significant number of NRIs coming in. It is a win-win for all sides," she said.

According to official figures, the global medical travel market was valued at around $115.6 billion in 2022 and is projected to reach around $286.1 billion by 2030.

India has emerged as one of the most significant destinations in this evolving global landscape. Industry estimates place the medical tourism market around $8.7 billion in 2025, with projections of $16.2 billion by 2030, as per government figures.

The preventive health check-up market has grown manifold over the past several years, and Apollo Hospitals alone did over 4 million such check-ups in 2025.

"Apollo started preventive health care 40 years ago with our health check-ups. Slowly, others have followed, and now you have many players offering such packages," Reddy said.

Apollo Hospitals is not looking at health check-ups as a pure business model, but a clinical model driven towards deep prevention and early detection.

"I think AI will enable that. Patient knowledge, the consumerism which is happening, is the other thing driving awareness," she said.

"In India, what's happening is patients show up, and they're sick. What we're detecting in our preventive checks is sometimes very advanced, where you need an angiogram or a stent the next day... (or) cancers which are advanced.

"The preventive check is not just a cholesterol. It's really looking at the whole person and longitudinally over time. So it's an engagement model," she explained.

The world is increasingly adopting artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool for healthcare, and India has started catching up, too, though there is a long way to go. According to Reddy, the practice should start by picking up symptoms using AI and using these "digital signals" to reprogramme one's daily plan.