An Investigation into the Situation of Iran's Social Security Organization in Health Tourism

Health tourism is an organized excursion made for physical or mental health recovery. The main goals of the health tourism are treatment and rehabilitation. A health package for the patients generally includes not only receiving medication, but also leisure activities. At present research which is descriptive and based on content analysis, an attempt is made to strategically analyze Iran’s social security organization’s plans on health tourism using SWOT method. The findings of the research are suggestive of the fact that the organization would be able to achieve breakthroughs in health tourism and hence obtain sensible revenues to pay for the pensioners and compensate for its deficits provided that it takes health tourism as its dominant strategy and prepares the grounds for it including investment in medicalstandards and international hospitals, boosting the communicative competence of the human resources belonging to the hospitals owned by the said organization, planning for welcoming foreign health tourists through marketing in target countries, and finally creating multilingual information centers and infrastructures to introduce the capabilities and the costs of the hospitals.