Medical Tourism Industry Analysis

The medical tourism has been estimated to be a $60 billion industry (Lunt et al, 2011) and despite the global economic turndown, is expected to grow at a rate of up to 35% in coming years (Deloitte, 2009). This can be seen in the USA where outbound medical tourists were approximately 750,000 and have been skyrocketed to 1.6 million by 2012, which accounted for 29% increase (Deloitte, 2009). According to this substantial growth, medical service providers should develop themselves to be sucessful destination and competitive among other competitors. There are several key factors emerging as a critical success factors which support a thriving medical tourism industry.
First of all is that labours are supposed to have a high-healthcare skills.

The fifth factor is to develop core strengths. Many of the most successful medical tourism destinations leverage existing strengths to foster the growth of medical tourism in their destination. Consideration of a destination’s existing strengths and characteristics is therefore important to develop the medical tourism destination. For example, destinations with strong tourism sectors, providing entertainment and leisure activities, are more likely to achieve high demand of international medical travelers if medical tourism would be introduced.
Furthermore, effective market segmentation and marketing is also important factor. Medical tourism is a global phenomenon and is attractive to a wide variety of consumers. Hence, it is a great need of healthcare providers for market segmentation in order to better understand target consumers, product requirement, marketing, and service delivery. There are some of patients do not focus primarily on quality or cost separately, but are interested in overall value. To satisfy their needs, the medical tourist should be accommodated at different price points, from luxury to budget options, according to their individual needs. For example, many medical tourists undertaking minor surgeries, which do not require long recovery time or specialised post-procedure care may not heavily take account of guest rooms’ designs and great medical facilities and

There are both positive and negative effects emerge in the destinations promoting medical tourism. To begins with positive view, the development of medical tourism will keep medical professionals in their local communities and increase the supply of quality medical services within the country. Furthermore, medical tourism development decreases jobs vacancy rate, rises wages for local populations, and also draw revenue which is re-invested in local economic development (Gan & Frederick, 2011a). However, local populations are likely to suffer from access to local healthcare providers due to the rising prices driven by international demand (Gan & Frederick, 2011a). Hence, the medical service providers should be aware of relationship with local communities together with developing medical tourism