Abstract

Despite the international healthcare industry’s rapid growth, little research exists about medical hotels. To fill this gap, this study identifies international patients’ possible outcomes of staying in a medical hotel and investigates their intention formation by considering attitudes and desires as well as the perceived outcome’s moderating impact. A qualitative approach identifies the possible outcomes of staying in a medical hotel, which can be distinctive from common medical/healthcare clinics, as perceived by international medical customers. Confirmatory factor analysis verifies a four-factor structure of the perceived outcome model (financial saving, convenience, medical service, and hospitality product). Structural equation modeling reveals that attitudes, desires, and intention significantly associate, and desires act as a mediator. Additionally, a metric invariance test shows that convenience, medical-service, and hospitality-product factors of the perceived outcomes significantly moderate forming intentions. Study results help medical hotel operators create effective strategies to attract more international tourists.

Introduction

In recent decades, medical tourism has become a popular and rapidly evolving tourism trend (Connell, 2006; Han, 2013; Reddy, York, & Brannon, 2010). Medical tourism occurs when patient-customers travel across national borders to achieve better health by engaging in operations/treatments and relaxation during a type of holiday. Increasingly, people seeking health treatment or beautification travel overseas for basic treatment (e.g., skincare, diet program, tooth whitening, dental fillings, wrinkle removal) and for highly advanced operations (e.g., cardiac surgery, cancer treatment, orthopedic surgery, ophthalmologic care, organ and cellular transplantation, gender reassignment procedures) (Connell, 2006; Horowitz, Rosensweig, & Jones, 2007; Reddy et al., 2010). On average, Asia’s medical tourism industry grows 20% annually, generating approximately $4 billion USD per year (Crozier & Baylis, 2010). A number of destination countries, particularly in Asia, compete for medical tourism patients by offering various medical, surgical, healthcare, and esthetic services (Horowitz et al., 2007).