Identification and analysis of factors contributing to the promotion of destination attractiveness for the development of medical tourism business

The purpose of this study is to analyze the factors affecting the promotion of destination attraction for the development of medical tourism business in Iran. The research is applied in terms of objective and used exploratory mixed method. The statistical population of the research in the qualitative section include academic experts in the field of medical tourism and hospital managers and in the quantitative section; foreign patients who have been admitted to treatment inTehran are considered. The 35 final components of the attractiveness of a country as a destination for medical tourism were obtained from 85 extractive components derived from literature review and similar research, and three rounds of Delphi's replication, which included eight main factors: the country of destination (operating conditions), demand conditions, competitiveness , government attitude, socio-cultural factors, information and marketing factors, factors related to treatment (services and medical facilities), and infrastructure and affiliated industries. The proposed model was verified by confirmatory factor analysis method in modeling structural equations using SmartPLS software. Priority and rank with Fuzzy AHP showed Factors related to treatment (services and medical facilities) with a weight of 0.259; Competitiveness with a weight of 0.188; and the Condition of the destination country with a weight of 0.166 among the eight