Ranking the effective factors in attracting health tourists in Tehran: Application of multi-criteria decision-making model

Health tourism is rapidly emerging as a symbol of international trade in health care. The present study was aimed to identify and prioritize the effective factors in attracting health tourists in Tehran province by multi-criteria decision-making model. The present study is a descriptive research which was carried out in a cross-sectional method in 2016 in two stages. In the first stage, the factors affecting the attraction of health tourism were identified with reviewing the studies. And in the second stage, the identified effective factors were ranked, which was carried out using the Analytic Hierarchy Process. In order to collect the required data, a paired comparison questionnaire was employed. The reliability of questionnaire was confirmed according to the inconsistency rate which was 0.02. Expert Choice 11.0 was employed to analyze and weight the factors. After the factors were weighted, they were prioritized based on their assigned weights. The results of the present study showed that all of the participants believed that quality with a weight of 0.223, patient-centered areas with a weight of 0.106, and appropriate time with a weight of 0.100 were ranked first to third. According to the results of the present study, it can be concluded that quality of the delivered services is the most important criteria in absorbing health tourists in the province and even in the country. © 2016 Hosein Shabaninejad et al