Ranking the strategies for Indian medical tourism sector through the integration of SWOT analysis and TOPSIS method

Abstract

Purpose

Organizations have to evaluate their internal and external environments in this highly competitive world. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis is a very useful technique which analyzes the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of an organization for taking strategic decisions and it also provides a foundation for the formulation of strategies. But the drawback of SWOT analysis is that it does not quantify the importance of individual factors affecting the organization and the individual factors are described in brief without weighing them. Because of this reason, SWOT analysis can be integrated with any multiple attribute decision-making (MADM) technique like the technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS), analytical hierarchy process, etc., to evaluate the best alternative among the available strategic alternatives. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach

In this study, SWOT analysis is integrated with a multicriteria decision-making technique called TOPSIS to rank different strategies for Indian medical tourism in order of priority.

Findings

SO strategy (providing best facilitation and care to the medical tourists at par to developed countries) is the best strategy which matches with the four elements of S, W, O and T of SWOT matrix and 35 strategic indicators.

Practical implications

This paper proposes a solution based on a combined SWOT analysis and TOPSIS approach to help the organizations to evaluate and select strategies.

Originality/value

Creating a new technology or administering a new strategy always has some degree of resistance by employees. To minimize resistance, the author has used TOPSIS as it involves group thinking, requiring every manager of the organization to analyze and evaluate different alternatives and average measure of each parameter in final decision matrix.

Citation

Ajmera, P. (2017), "Ranking the strategies for Indian medical tourism sector through the integration of SWOT analysis and TOPSIS method", International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, Vol. 30 No. 8, pp. 668-679. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJHCQA-05-2016-0073