Health Tourism in Iran

This chapter shows that Iran has similar advantages to countries with a more developed brand of health tourism, including low costs, quality health services, competent doctors, and abundant natural and cultural attractions. The Health and Medical Ministry has developed 6 mandatory guidelines for medical centers receiving health tourists: these include the general condition of the facility, the workforce, medical facilities, geographical location, operational conditions, and the content of medical center websites. The Ministry offers facilities to hospitals and organizations applying to join the medical tourism program. In particular, the progressive provision of medical procedures, the distribution and marketing of health services, medical training, medical products, and equipment, is within a standardized framework of guidelines and development priorities. The chapter concludes that these interventions are designed to establish an effective presence in world and regional medical tourism markets.

Travel for Treatment

Medical tourism is growing and diversifying at a high rate. The medical tourism in India is poised to be next success story after software industry. This term is used to refer to travel activity that involves a medical procedure or activities that promote the wellbeing of the patient. The term medical tourism is the act of travelling to other countries to obtain medical, dental and surgical care. (Connell 2006) All the beneficiaries of this industry are putting their best foot forward by providing quality services at affordable cost in order to lure medical tourists. It goes without saying that only those health care organizations will survive and succeed in gaining competitive advantage over others that incorporates quality improvement process on a continuous basis. The results show that there is significant growth of medical tourism in India, which is growing at the rate 30% in 2015 (Saravana 2015) The standards of medical treatment and hospital facilities provided to patients have significantly improved in India with 21 hospitals in India already accredited by JCI. In this study hospital chosen for the present study is the hospital one amongst the list of JCI accredited hospitals in India. The objective of this study is to identify the medical tourist's satisfaction level & also to identify the grey areas for better services. The results show that they were quite satisfied with the services availed & are recommending it to others due to the significant treatment services.

Global Medical Tourism

Medical tourism is related to the travel of patients from one country to another in order to obtain medical treatment in that country. There are several countries worldwide promoting medical tourism and attracting patients. Most of the developing nations attract the patients because of cost benefits whereas the developed nations attract patients who require complex surgeries or any kind of advanced medical treatment. The main aim of this research paper is to focus on the development of medical tourism industry, worldwide. Medical Tourism industry throughout the world is growing at a fast rate. It has huge potential for generating employment and earning large amount of foreign exchange. This will help in the country's overall economic development. Medical tourism incorporates multi-dimensional activity but basically it is a service industry. Hence, medical tourism is a vital revenue earning source especially for the developing nations. Hence, it can be said that it is a win situation for both the patients as well as the destination countries.

The Medical Tourism Industry in the BRIC Nations

Despite BRIC's roaring economic growth over the past decade, and its citizens' growing belief that it is finally ready to join the league of global superpowers by the end of 2020. With the progress of the IT revolution, advances in transportation and communication technology, the evolution of financial techniques, and the easing of restrictions on trade and investment, there has been a geometric increase in the international movement of people, products, money and information in the BRIC nations. The economic dynamism has led the emerging economies (BRIC countries) to diversify their business activities from a global perspective, and attempt to create optimal global value chains. Demand for tourism in Brazil, Russia, India and China is expected to grow in tandem with rapid economic growth. These nations are rich in natural and manmade resources and should cope quite well and have tremendous opportunities for the growth of tourism especially medical tourism between these nations. This chapter will explore BRIC member countries, on how they can cooperate to further promote the BRIC Vision and establish a viable healthcare initiative focusing on Indian medical tourism that will serve as a blueprint and model for other economies.

Empirical Analysis on the Medical Tourism Policy in Taiwan

“Medical Tourism” is a growing industry, attracting more and more attention. Taiwan's government, hopeful that this new industry could generate considerable revenue, has declared its ambition to become the premier choice for cross-country medical care for international visitors. The policy network approach emphasizes the interaction between policy actors. This chapter examines Taiwan's medical tourism development from the model of public policy implementation. We present findings from twelve semi-structured interviews with stakeholders across medical service providers, as well as government officers, and civil society sectors. We found that medical tourism in Taiwan is a growing service, with both public and private sector involvement. However, it is still lagging behind regional competitors such as Singapore, Thailand, and India. Thus, active efforts should be made to encourage the coordination between the medical care sector, tourism industry, and relevant authorities.

Role of Internet in the Development of Medical Tourism Service in Tunisia

Medical tourism is gaining importance through the last decades thanks to internationalization. in this area, internationalization has been facilitated by the internet revolution that enables instantaneous transmission of text, audio and visual data as well as graphics, which makes the medical consultation distance shorter and moreover reliable. a state of the art on internationalization, medical tourism and digital marketing has been presented. Furthermore, the authors, through a rich case study of the International Medical Embassy, examined the role played by the different digital marketing techniques in the development of medical tourism services in an emerging country such as Tunisia. based that, theoretical as well as practical recommendations are presented.

Halal Branding for Medical Tourism

This chapter explores the emergence and development of Halal branded hospitals and medical facilities as a product of Medical Tourism for Muslim patients around the world and in India. Halal tourism is a sub-category of spiritual tourism, where one has to abide by the Sharia law to satisfy Muslim customers. The main objective of the chapter is to focus on a niche category of halal medical tourism, where Sharia rules are followed to attract the medical tourist mainly from Islamic countries. This chapter also proposes a typology of Muslim medical tourist's cultural sensitivities and recommends branding and certifying Halal Medical Tourism hospitals, healthcare facilities, pharmaceuticals, products, and services to attract Muslim patients, and provides challenges and opportunities with future research directions. The case studied in this chapter is of the Global Health City, the first Halal Certified Medical Hospital facility in Chennai, India. It presents a model for halal branding of Indian Medical Tourism based on the halal decision-making paradigm for Muslim customers designed by Wilson and Liu (2010). The model presented here indicates attitudes of being rational or emotional and elements reflecting affective and cognitive feelings for Muslim patients seeking halal treatment in halal hospitals.

The Impact of Social Network on Italian Users' Behavioural Intention for the Choice of a Medical Tourist Destination

Tourism represents one of the most important industries in the global economy. Medical tourism is not a new phenomenon: mankind has traveled to foreign lands to access treatment for many years. Current research in information and communication technology considerably affects the tourism industry by providing innovative tools capable, on the one hand, of supporting tourists in organizing their holidays and, on the other, of supplying fast and efficient information on tourist destination. Published literature shows that many aspects of medical tourists' behavior are under-researched. One of these aspects is the impact of social media on tourists' behavior for the choice of tourist medical destination, which is the original focus of this research. This paper explores how a social network can become a strategic platform using eWOM (electronic Word of Mouth) as a tool for disseminating fast and detailed information for the choice of medical tourist destination. A survey instrument was used to collect information from Italian active users of a social network: Facebook. Data was solicited from 960 active, experienced users. The findings support the development of medical tourism communication strategies focused on the online contexts as factors capable of influencing medical tourists' behavior in a more efficient way. Implications and future research directions are discussed.

The Role of Social Media for Knowledge Dissemination in Medical Tourism

The use of social media for information dissemination for education, environmental movement, natural disasters, emergency, election campaign, grass root movements, non-profit organisations, public health communication, and marketing for health promotion, e-governance, and political revolutions is well known. The economic significance of the health and medical tourism sector in the global healthcare business should not be underestimated. Internet is playing a leading role as a platform for the dissemination of medical tourism business information. In this century, more and more actual and potential tourists are accessing the internet and social media applications to find and disseminate factual information regarding medical tourism facilitators, destinations, super-speciality hospitals, specialist doctors and nurses, quality and accreditation, accommodation facility, cost, waiting period for surgery and sharing their positive and negative experiences to inform potential medical tourists. Healthcare providers and medical tourists acquire information, create, collaborate, communicate and disseminate healthcare and medical tourism related information through the Word-of-Social-Media (WoSM) tools such as FaceBook, Flickr, Twitter, Blogs, Forums, YouTube patient testimonials, Google Plus, LinkedIn, Photo and video sharing, Alexa and mobile applications. Therefore social media has a great potential as an information source and a knowledge dissemination tool for tourism industry to network and create clusters locally and globally, to exploit new innovative technologies for interaction and collaboration between the healthcare providers as well as the medical tourists. The main contribution of this chapter is to explore and discuss the role and use of social media applications for knowledge dissemination by hospitals and the medical tourists in the global business of medical tourism in India.

Best “Experience” Practices in Medical Tourism

The principal objective of this paper is to demonstrate the best practices in the rising trend of H2H and Medical Tourism. The concept of “Experience Economy” expedites the merging process of hospitality and hospitals: patients are also travelers now whose needs are not merely commodity type of medical care anymore but a memorable wellbeing experience. Moreover, H2H optimizes the process of realizing excellent care, which serves as the fundamental reason for tourism industry. In the section of “Best Practices in Medical Tourism, Christiana Care Way, Starwood Five Human Truths, and H2H packages in Switzerland are selected to show how patient/guest experience can be made more interactive and less transactional. Therefore, although H2H demands the considerable collaboration from all parties involved in order to ultimately present the excellent care that customers, tourists, and patients want, H2H indeed carries tremendous opportunity for hospitals, hotels, Spa, restaurants, transportation, and more.