Medical Tourism Services: The Role of Patients’ Perceived Health Consciousness and Value

Abstract

Medical tourism is traveling to another country for medical services. The transformation of global healthcare system is opening the floodgates for medical tourism. Many factors influence the decision to seek medical tour overseas. Health value in terms of biologically given and personally acquired potentials is based on patient health consciousness, pushing individual take healthy action. The aim of this study is to examine the factors (e.g., consumer’s health consciousness and perceived health value) that affect the satisfaction of medical tourism services. Also, the study considers demography character (e.g., age, gender, income level and health insurance) as moderating effect between satisfaction and loyalty. The data was collected 427 medical tourists’ data for inbound Korean medical tourist. The results show importance of motivating health value regarding medical tourism service’s satisfaction and loyalty while no impact on patients perceived satisfaction and loyalty. Through the results, medical tourism manager will need to develop medical tourism services that can stimulate consumer health values.