CHINA, TAIWAN: Value as a medical tourism driver for Chinese people going to Taiwan

A new academic study on Chinese medical tourists who go to Taiwan suggests that they are looking for value for money. This in turn is a mix of medical quality, service quality, price and ‘enjoyment” of the whole process.?

Hsiu-Yuan Wang of Chung Hua University has produced a research paper ‘Value as a medical tourism driver’ for Emerald Group Publishing.

Purpose
The study contends that customers’ perceived value can drive medical tourism. To demonstrate this, this article proposes and tests a research model capturing elements of perceived benefits and sacrifice that, by affecting the perceived value of medical tourism products, influence the buying intention of potential customers.

Design/methodology/approach
Potential medical tourists from China are researched due to their cultural similarity to Taiwan, and the absence of a language barrier. Data from 301 usable questionnaires were tested against the research model using the structural equation modeling approach.

Findings
The results indicated that perceived value was a key predictor of customer intentions. As for benefits, perceived medical quality, service quality and enjoyment were critical components that significantly influenced the perception of value. Regarding sacrifice, the effects of perceived risk on perceived value were significant.

Research limitations/implications
The study targeted potential medical tourists. Therefore, a validation using another large sample of actual medical tourists is required to generalize the findings.

Practical implications
The findings can assist governments in developing policies that promote medical destination and provide insights into research on how destination countries can make medical tourism a win/win option for themselves and international patients.

Originality/value
The author claims that the proposed model is original and “Unlike most prior papers which take a conceptual approach to medical tourism, this study contributes to an understanding of the factors that influence the travel intentions of medical tourists through its empirical investigation, and especially in its targeting of customers’ value perception.”

This is valuable research that shows how price-driven medical tourism marketing is now out of date.

The study can be bought from

http://www.emeraldinsight.com/journals.htm?articleid=17053573

View the original article here