The critical factors impacting on the global medical tourism service supply chain management

Global medical tourism service (GMTS) supply chain is fast gaining momentum, and relationships between its participants, including patients, are increasingly becoming complex and subject to dynamic change. Medical tourism service in developing countries has emerged as the top growing component of the tourism industry, despite the global economic downturn. The GMTS supply chain is driven by an increasing accessibility of quality healthcare services, and low healthcare costs in developing countries. Many factors such as low cost, government support, and high private investments are believed to be contributing to a significant growth in the medical tourism service market in countries including, Thailand, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Columbia, Austria and Saudi Arabia. This article is motivated by the lack of available supply of cost effective, timely and private medical services in developed economies and the need to understand the predictability nature of demand drivers of medical tourism to developing countries. We then, consider conceptualizing cost, waiting time and privacy as important characteristics upstream and downstream the global medical supply chain. The authors of this article consider that as medical tourism product is similar to a consumer product in supply chain management, to a certain extent, many of the operations objectives found in a manufacturing supply chain can also be readily applicable to the medical tourism supply chain. We propose and test a model, that is founded on three supply chain related constructs---cost, waiting time, and privacy-to inform the demand for global medical service.