Identifying and Prioritizing Components of the Medical and Healthcare Tourism Entrepreneurship Ecosystem

One of the important factors that may affect the destination of developmentis medical and healthcare tourism. The presence of experts in medical tourism and thegeographical location of Iran is one of the most important factors in the sustainabledevelopment of Iran. This study aimed to identify and prioritize the components of themedical and healthcare tourism entrepreneurship ecosystem (EE) in Iran with a structuralinterpretivemodeling approach.

This research is methodologically a mixed (qualitative-quantitative) exploratorytype, and its participants were health tourism experts and entrepreneurs. The method forselecting the participants was Purposeful sampling.15 participants were interviewed based ontheoretical saturation. The data collection tools were interviews and questionnaires. Also, toanalyze the data in this research, we used two overlapping processes of open and axial codingand structural-interpretive modeling.

The results of data analysis showed that the components of the health tourism EEwere included in the seven main dimensions of law, regulations and governance factors,financing and investment, the role of culture, influential institutions (universities andEducational centers), influential regional market factors, the role of human capital, andeffective infrastructure.

Researchers examining entrepreneurial ecosystems have not studied the roleof a regional level of analysis. The results of qualitative analysis and Interpretive StructuralModeling (ISM) showed that to create the entrepreneurial ecosystem of the medical andhealthcare tourism, the central factors resulting from qualitative research interacted with eachother at three different levels, and the set of factors at these levels caused the medical sciencesuniversity to move towards creating an Entrepreneurial ecosystem drive in the university