How we choose hospitals and surgeons
Every hospital we quote from has to clear a written checklist before it goes on our list, and stay on the right side of it afterwards. This page is that checklist. We publish it so you can hold us to it.
There are more than 1,299 NABH-accredited hospitals in India. Accreditation is where we start, not where we finish. It tells you a hospital meets a standard, not that it is the right place for your operation.
What we check about the hospital
Accreditation, verified at source
NABH or JCI, checked against the accrediting body's own register rather than the hospital's website, with the expiry date recorded. We re-check annually.
Procedure volume in the specific unit
Not the hospital's total, the unit's. A hospital doing four hundred knee replacements a year is a different proposition from one doing thirty, whatever the brochure says.
Willingness to answer hard questions
We ask for the unit's surgical site infection rate, its complication rate and its mortality data for the procedure. Not every hospital will give us all of it. How a hospital responds to being asked is itself information, and we record the answer, including when they decline.
International patient handling
Whether there is a real international desk, whether interpreters exist for our patients' languages, and how long paperwork actually takes rather than how long they say it takes.
Pricing behaviour
Whether the estimate they give resembles the invoice they issue. We track this case by case. A hospital whose invoices routinely exceed its estimates without a clinical reason comes off the list.
Intensive care capability and escalation
What happens when a case goes wrong at three in the morning, and whether the intensivist is in the building.
What we check about the surgeon
- Registration, verified against the National Medical Commission register
- Qualifications and where they trained, checked rather than repeated
- Years operating independently in this specific procedure, not total years in medicine
- Whether they will do a video consultation before you travel. A surgeon who will not speak to a patient beforehand does not go on our list
- Whether the surgeon named on your quote is the surgeon who operates. This is the most common complaint in medical travel, and we get it in writing
What disqualifies a hospital
Any one of these and they come off the list
- Accreditation lapsed or not verifiable at source
- Refusing to name the operating surgeon in advance
- Invoices that repeatedly exceed estimates without a clinical explanation
- Pressuring patients into a decision, or into a more expensive option, without a clinical reason
- Any request that we not tell a patient something
What we cannot tell you
We are not clinicians, and we do not audit hospitals. We check documents, ask questions, record answers and track what happens to our own patients. That is real, and it is also limited. It is not a clinical inspection and we will not present it as one.
Where we do not know something, we will say so rather than fill the gap.