About Swasthy Wellcare

What we actually do

A patient is told they need an operation. Their own hospital has a waiting list, or does not perform it, or the family has been advised to seek a second opinion. From that point there is a long list of things nobody has explained: which hospital abroad does this well, what it will cost, whether a visa is possible, who meets them at the airport, and who answers the phone at two in the morning when something goes wrong.

We do that list. We read the diagnosis and the reports, put them in front of consultants who treat the condition, come back with a written estimate, and then handle the visa letter, the flights, the accommodation, the interpreter and the follow-up once the patient is home. One named case manager stays with the case from the first message to the last consultation.

Who pays us

The patient does not. Our coordination service is free to the people who use it, and we are paid by the hospitals in our network. We say this in the open because the arrangement is normal in this industry and hiding it is what makes people suspicious of it.

It also has a limit we hold ourselves to: the arrangement does not change the price a patient is quoted, and we never take payment for treatment on a hospital's behalf. Treatment fees are paid by the patient to the hospital directly. If anyone claiming to be from this company asks a patient to transfer treatment money to us, that is not us, and we would like to hear about it.

How we choose a hospital or a consultant

Two questions, in this order. Does the hospital hold current accreditation, and what is its record in the specific procedure this patient needs? A hospital with an excellent general reputation and no volume in the operation somebody is flying in for is the wrong recommendation, however well known it is.

We check a consultant's qualifications and experience against their own hospital's published profile before we list them, and we check again when we are told something has changed. Where we cannot confirm a detail, we leave it out. An empty field on our website is not a problem; a confident sentence we cannot support is.

What we will not do

We do not publish a headline price for surgery. What treatment costs depends on the procedure a surgeon actually recommends after reading the reports, how long the patient stays, and what the case turns out to need — so a number on a web page is either padded or it is going to change, and both of those end the same way. We send one figure, in writing, that we can stand behind.

We do not give medical advice, and nothing on this website is a substitute for a clinician who has read the reports. We do not promise an outcome, and we do not describe any hospital or surgeon as the best: it is not a claim anybody can support, and in medicine it is not a harmless one.

What a case manager is for

Not a call centre. One person, named, who knows the case — which reports have been sent, what the surgeon said, when the visa appointment is, and what the family is worried about. They are the person a patient messages, and the person who chases the hospital when a reply is slow.

They also do the unglamorous part: making sure the discharge summary and the follow-up plan actually reach the doctor at home, and arranging the teleconsultation a month later that most people forget to book.

Your records and your privacy

Medical reports sent to us are stored privately, outside the public website, and every time one is opened by our team it is recorded. They are shared with a hospital or a consultant only to answer the question the patient asked us, and they are never sent to an advertising or analytics platform. A patient can ask us what we hold and ask us to delete it.