Designing the antecedents model of word of mouth in development of health tourism marketing (A case study of health hospitals located in Tehran)

Health tourism in its present form is an emerging phenomenon in which citizens travel to other destinations (many of which are less developed countries) in search of high-quality and inexpensive medical services.

In this research, the researcher has used  mixed method approach. For this purpose, in the first study, in order to know the components of the background model of word of mouth in the development of health tourism,marketing grounded theory has been used , and in the second study, the model was tested using quantitative method. The data collection tools used in the first study were  protocol and in-depth  interviews with eighteen international hospital managers, and in the next step, the required data were distributed among 384 patients and the result was analyzed by AMOS software.

The researcher conducted eighteen interviews , reached to theoretical saturation and finally extracted 250 open codes and analyzed  based on Strauss and Corbin's point of view, the analysis and results were presented in the form of six main dimensions and thirty sub-dimensions.

The researcher conducted his research in a form of a model including six dimensions; Health tourism,health center brand equity,word of mouth,medical service quality,halal tourism, and finally health tourism center brand loyalty  and thirty sub-dimensions. Also, the research results have shown that medical service quality has a positive and significant effect on health tourism, health tourism on brand equity, brand equity on word of mouth,health center brand loyalty on brand equity, and halal tourism on brand equity.