Providing a Media Model for Hospitals to Attract Health Tourists Based on the Laswell Communication Model

Despite the high quality of medical services and cheap prices, health tourism in Iran has not yet been able to gain its position in the market due to several factors, including the lack of proper use of media and communication tools. Of course, about the nature of health tourism, significant and relatively extensive researches have been done so far, but the issue of identifying the role of media in attracting health tourists has been neglected. In this research, which deals with the same issue, in-depth interviews were conducted with experts in the field of health and media. The data was collected through a questionnaire and analyzed using confirmatory factor analysis (qualitative method). The main factors in this research were divided into 4 groups: message type, audience, communication channels, and the message transmitter based on the communication model. Classification and sub-components were presented with more explanation and based on current issues in the form of health tourism model. The results showed that the audience is the most important factor for the development of health tourism in the country, and after that, the factors of communication channels, message type and message transmitter are ranked third and fourth respectively.