Medical Tourism Development in Golestan Province; An Assessment of Identified Solutions

The aim of this study was to determine and assess solutions to develop medical tourism in Golestan Province, Iran. A qualitative method was adopted to collect data from experts on tourism and medical sectors from February to August 2015.Analytic Network Process (ANP) is used to identify dependency among criteria and subcriteria .The results reveal that most effective criteria on medical tourism development in Golestan based on importance are: Structure, physician, quality, communication, hospital, promotion, advertising and distribution channels and country as the last effective criteria. Several solutions were considered based on the criteria importance that on top of the list are: promoting private participation in medical tourism, specialized hospitals and clinics for medical tourists with supportive facilities and public-private cooperation.