Docs / Product Documentation

1. Product Overview

1.1 Vision

Make world-class treatment in India accessible to international patients without the fear, friction and opacity that define cross-border care today. The brand promise is care without borders.

Cross-border medical travel is, for most patients, opaque, fragmented and frightening. Pricing is unclear, no single party is accountable, and patients are asked to wire money to a foreign hospital they have never seen. The visa and documentation step is the highest-anxiety, highest-failure point, with rules that differ by country and are poorly explained. Patients fall back on informal, commission-driven agents with little transparency and no recourse.

Global Clinic replaces that chaos with one managed journey: a visa-first workflow, escrow-protected payments, a named human coordinator, and corridor-specific Country Packs, combined into a single 14-stage experience that a patient and their family can actually trust.

1.2 Objectives

The platform exists to serve two sides of a market at once.

For patients, the objective is a single trustworthy path to treatment: one place to get an opinion, a transparent price, a protected payment, a visa, travel, in-country care, and follow-up. Success is measured by conversion from enquiry to funded case, by on-time visa grants, and by completed journeys with verified positive outcomes.

For hospitals, the objective is reliable, diversified, source-country demand that they cannot easily generate themselves corridor by corridor. India's inbound medical flow had been dangerously concentrated in a single country; the market is now urgently diversifying toward the Gulf, Africa and Central Asia. Global Clinic is built to own exactly those diversification corridors and deliver patients hospitals can count on.

Commercially, the platform earns a B2B facilitation fee from the hospital (in the region of 10 to 12 percent) plus a logistics and concierge margin, with future provider-SaaS and compliant affiliate revenue. The model targets roughly 60 percent gross margins and a path to profitability by Year 3. All such figures are planning assumptions, not results.

1.3 Scope

In scope (built today)

A public marketing site: value proposition, the 14-stage journey, a visa-engine spotlight, corridor cards, a clinic marketplace with comparison, treatment catalogue, transparent pricing and savings, verified reviews, quality and accreditation, and destinations.
A patient portal (/portal/*): Journey dashboard, Find Care, Care Plan, Visa and Immigration, Travel and Stay, Documents wallet, Payments and Escrow, Messages, plus Account, Settings and Notifications.
A clinic console (/clinic/*): Dashboard, Inquiries, Cases, public Profile, Procedures and Pricing, Reviews, Team and Surgeons, Settings, and an onboarding wizard.
Authentication screens: sign in, register, verify email, forgot and reset password (mock auth).
A data schema rich enough to grow into the real system, including stage owners and SLA targets and Country-Pack attributes (language, currency, payment method, data regime, risk tier).
An in-product help and walkthrough system that documents every screen and powers this documentation.

In scope (specified, planned, not yet built)

Coordinator / Operations console: the case-management spine, with queue, SLA timers, tasks, internal notes and escalations.
Provider / Hospital portal beyond the current clinic console basics: quotes, bookings, document exchange, milestone confirmation for escrow release.
Admin / Country-Pack console: versioned, feature-flagged corridor rules driving the visa engine.
Agent / Affiliate portal: referral codes, lead submission, milestone tracking and compliant payouts.
Compliance backbone: consent ledger, DSAR workflow, breach workflow, sanctions and AML screening, audit logging.
Real backend: API layer, database, identity and access management, real payments and escrow, document storage, real-time messaging, and government and provider integrations.
Internationalisation: locale tables, language switcher, right-to-left layout and localised fonts (intentionally removed from the current English-only build, to be reintroduced).

Out of scope

Practising medicine, giving clinical advice, or making treatment decisions. Global Clinic is a facilitator. Clinical responsibility rests with the treating hospital and surgeon.
Acting as an insurer, a lender, or a licensed travel agency in its own right. These functions are delivered through regulated partners.
Destinations other than India in the current phase.

1.4 Target users and personas

The platform is multi-sided. The personas below drive the role-based access model (see Features and Requirements, RBAC).

Patient (built)

The international patient seeking treatment. In the reference build this is a demonstrative patient, Yusuf Al-Rashid, a 58-year-old from Muscat, Oman, travelling to Chennai for a coronary artery bypass. The patient persona values reassurance, transparency, a single point of accountability, and protection of their money. They are often not the sole decision-maker.

Family decision-maker and attendant (served through the patient surface)

Cross-border patients rarely travel alone. The platform supports up to two accompanying attendants (typically blood relatives) through the e-Medical Attendant visa flow, attendant-friendly accommodation, and family communication. The funding decision is frequently made by a family member, including diaspora relatives abroad.

Care Coordinator (partially served; console planned)

The named human who owns the patient relationship end to end. In the demo, this is a multilingual coordinator who speaks Arabic, English and Hindi with a typical reply time of around 8 minutes. The coordinator is the single most important conversion and retention asset. The dedicated operations console that this persona needs is planned.

Provider / Clinic (built: console basics)

The partner hospital or clinic. Through the clinic console they manage their public profile, indicative pricing, inbound inquiries, active cases, reviews, and clinical team. The demo clinic is Apollo Hospitals, Chennai. Deeper provider functions (quote authoring, milestone confirmation) are planned.

Specialist / Medical reviewer (planned)

The clinician who reviews records and issues the medical opinion. This is both a quality gate and the moment trust is built. Served today only as content; the review workflow and console are planned.

Visa / Immigration operations (planned)

The team that drives the invitation letter and the corridor-specific visa application on the government side. The patient sees status and timeline updates; the back-office tooling is planned.

Travel Desk (partially served)

The team that confirms flights, accommodation and transfers the patient selects. The patient does not transact travel directly; they express preferences and the Travel Desk books them.

Finance / Escrow operations (planned)

The team that manages milestone-based escrow release, refunds and reconciliation on an auditable ledger.

Administrator (planned)

Configures Country Packs, manages the hospital panel, sets feature flags, and owns platform configuration.

Agent / Affiliate (planned)

Source-country referrers who submit attributed leads and are paid on milestone-gated outcomes, never on raw leads, and never as a clinical kickback.

Medical Director (governance)

Owns clinical governance: empanelment standards, the 24/7 escalation path, and complaint and incident handling.

Support agent (cross-cutting)

Handles patient and clinic questions and escalations using the contextual help system and the documented exception playbooks.

1.5 Core value propositions

For patients:

The visa engine. The hardest, scariest step becomes a guided, checkable flow: corridor-aware required documents, validation, an auto-generated invitation letter, and live status to grant. This is the platform's sharpest wedge and most defensible feature.
Escrow-protected payments. Money is held in escrow and released to the hospital only as verified milestones are met (for example admission, procedure, discharge), with full pre-arrival refunds. This directly removes the single biggest objection in cross-border care.
A named human coordinator. A real person, multilingual, fast to respond, who owns the relationship. The coordinator, not the website, closes and carries the case.
Transparency. Itemised, all-in pricing (treatment, hospital, logistics, facilitation fee) with verified reviews and accreditation badges, never a hidden markup.
End-to-end coordination. One platform from enquiry to recovery: opinion, quote, escrow, visa, travel, in-country care, and structured follow-up.

For hospitals:

Diversified demand from exactly the corridors they are chasing.
Certainty of payment through escrow, with a clean, auditable money trail.
A managed funnel that arrives pre-qualified, triaged and document-ready.
Reputation tooling: verified reviews and a quality-forward marketplace presence.

The moat: corridor depth encoded as Country Packs (visa, document, payment and data rules per source country); trust assets (verified outcomes, reviews, escrow, a named coordinator); a two-sided network of vetted hospitals and tracked affiliates; and operational data (conversion, SLA and outcomes by corridor) that compounds over time.

1.6 Platform capabilities and limitations

What the platform can do today

Present a credible, trust-forward marketplace: browse and compare accredited clinics, treatments, transparent prices and savings, verified reviews, accreditation, and destinations.
Run a patient through a realistic end-to-end journey UI: a 14-stage dashboard, a working visa checklist and timeline, a documents wallet, an escrow and milestone ledger view, travel and stay selection, and secure-style messaging.
Demonstrate the signature cross-screen flow: uploading a required document in the Documents wallet verifies the linked visa checklist item and unlocks Submit application on the Visa screen, persisting across navigation.
Give a clinic a working console to manage profile, pricing, inquiries, cases, reviews and team.
Document every screen in-product (purpose, controls, fields, workflows, navigation, rules, data, errors, roles, related features and a flow diagram) and offer an interactive guided walkthrough.

Current limitations (important for support and stakeholders)

Mock data and client state. Data is read from static files; mutations live in client memory and are lost on refresh. There is no persistence, no real account, and a single hard-coded demo patient and demo clinic.
No real backend. No database, no real authentication, no real payments or escrow movement, no real document storage, no real messaging delivery, and no external integrations are live.
Operational consoles are not built. The coordinator, admin / Country-Pack, and agent surfaces, which is where the business is actually run, are specified but not implemented.
Visa engine is illustrative. It derives completion from a document status flip rather than a real corridor rules engine and a government integration.
English only. Internationalisation (Arabic and right-to-left, Russian, French, Swahili) was deliberately removed and must be reintroduced for the target corridors.
No compliance machinery yet. Consent ledger, DSAR, breach workflow, sanctions and AML screening, and audit logging are designed but not implemented.

Treat anything marked Planned in this documentation as target behaviour that defines the production system, not as a description of current runtime behaviour.

Glossary

Corridor: a source-country to destination route, for example Oman to India, with its own visa rules, currency, payment methods, language and risk tier.
Country Pack: the versioned configuration bundle for a corridor: required documents, validation, processing times, fees, paper vs e-Visa routing, currency, payment method, data regime and risk tier.
Escrow: a protected holding of patient funds released to the hospital only as verified milestones are met, with pre-arrival refunds.
Milestone: a verifiable event that triggers an escrow release, for example admission, procedure, or discharge.
14-stage journey: the canonical lifecycle from Enquiry to Close-out, each stage with an accountable owner and an SLA target.
Facilitator, not provider: the legal and brand posture that Global Clinic coordinates care but does not practise medicine.
Attendant: an accompanying family member (typically up to two) travelling with the patient under the e-Medical Attendant visa.
JCI / NABH: Joint Commission International and the National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Healthcare Providers, the accreditation standards used to vet the hospital panel.
Care Coordinator: the named human who owns the patient relationship across all 14 stages.
DSAR: Data Subject Access Request, a privacy right to access, correct or delete personal data.
DPDP: India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act.