Two Decades of Medical Tourism Research in India 2005 to 2025: A Critical Review and Future Research Agenda

Indian medical tourism has evolved from being a niche export industry focused on cost to a multidimensional research field in the areas of policy, quality management, destination marketing and digital engagement with patients. This paper is a critical, narrative review of the research on medical tourism available in India for the last twenty years (2005–2025) and examines changes in medical tourism research themes over the last two decades, highlighting the gaps in the study. The review consists of three general periods of research. The first is a basic decade (2005–2012) focused on cost, infrastructure development and initial government policies. The second is the accreditation, service quality, destination image–competitiveness benchmarking stage (2013–2019), which concentrates on the consolidation of the level of accreditation, service quality, destination image and competitiveness measuring of destinations like Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia. Thirdly, the most recent decade (2020–2025) constitutes a period of digital and pandemic-driven disruption, in which the aftermath of the pandemic, digital marketing, social media trust mechanisms, and consumer behavior became the dominant subjects of research. In all three stages, four recurring gaps are found: a lack of disaggregating the domestic and international experience of patients in samples; limited combination of regulatory critique and consideration of ethics with consumers' perception of their experience; lack of depth in longitudinal or comparative research trends and the nature of patient decision-making over time; and a lack of critical investigation of the digital divide across samples of medical tourists who are not all digitally literate. The review suggests a five-point future research agenda that fills these gaps: nationality-disaggregated empirical design, integrated frameworks of ethics and marketing, longitudinal studies of digital engagement, cross-destination benchmarking of digital marketing effectiveness, and digital-equity research. The review includes structured and chronological information on the evolution of the medical tourism field that aims to provide an orientation for future empirical and policy-oriented works on medical tourism in India.