India's healthcare industry is looking global while acting local. Spurred by a phenomenal boost in the medical tourism industry — poised to touch the $2 billion mark in India by 2012, according to a joint report by McKinsey and the Confederation of Indian Industry — a number of premier healthcare institutes are now vying for international accreditations to give themselves a global appeal.

And to cater to the surge in demand are a basket of accrediting bodies, prominent among which are the Joint Commission International (JCI) and ISO 9001:2000, which is the generic standard for Quality Management System across the world.

So far, two Indian healthcare chains — Apollo and Wockhardt — have been granted the Joint Commission International (JCI) Accreditation, catapulting them into an exclusive league of 71 international hospitals, such as Harvard Medical and Massachusetts General, to have cut the grade.

In fact, most Indian hospitals seem to be vying for either ISO accreditations or the JCI, as other reputed ones like the Australian Council on Healthcare Standards and the Malaysian Society for Quality in Healthcare primarily grant recognition to hospitals in their own country.

What’s spurring the demand is the increased medical tourism activity in the country and the lack of any credible domestic accreditation body. “Even now, Indian hospitals are not required to provide information on the outcomes of treatments or procedures used. In such a scenario, there is a pressing need to have standardization norms to discipline the healthcare delivery process throughout the country,” feels Vishal Bali, CEO of Wockhardt Hospitals, which received JCI certification a year ago.

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