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Purpose – Hospitals need to determine if an international patient department is a necessity to communicate with and manage international patients.

Design/Methodology/Approach – A benchmarking instrument was created to assess the level of professionalism in managing international patients, including reviewing and validating processes by two university hospitals, professionals, and an expert panel.

Findings – First, the differences between the hospitals depended on the will of the hospital to engage in such activities. Second, the differences depended on the embedding national context in which the hospital was situated. Further validation revealed the importance of other supportive services, such as cultural sensitivity and language. Finally, the microlevel phenomenon of international patient departments is placed within a macrolevel transnational health region development scheme.

Originality/Value – This study focused on the supply of services with respect to international patient departments, which could be related to efficiency and sustainability on a public health and health systems level.

Non‐discursive practices such as the economy and political constellations have always caused shifts in history. However, in the network society of today, these shifts have become omnipresent. Globalization of health and medical tourism have created a shift or rupture in the history of healthcare provision and into the lives of different stakeholders. The purpose of this paper is to detect and assess the rupture caused by global health care or medical tourism within the field of the written media, in order to define the reality of medical tourism as a trans‐historical field.

The methodology of this study comprised an extensive discourse analysis of written and new media performed over a time frame of more than a decade. Market, medical, ethical and patient discourses were detected along scientific sources, international and local newspapers.

Results indicate that a change in the market discourse has caused a shift in the attitude towards medical tourism, where ethical voices are seen as submissive to the market logic. In the current time perspective, medical tourism has become more mature with the development of non‐ethical counterparts such as organ tourism and reproductive tourism as a consequence.

The research framework shows that the general public receives a normative message from the medical tourism sector.

This paper aims to address and identify the major stakeholders in the medical tourism industry, based on their participation in medical tourism activities and their support for medical tourism development.

This paper systematically reviews the content of medical tourism studies from literature to identify key stakeholders and address the roles they play in the medical tourism industry.

This study shows that the key stakeholders in the medical tourism industry are eight, namely, medical tourists, health-care providers, government agencies, facilitators, accreditation and credentialing bodies, health-care marketers, insurance providers and infrastructure and facilities. These stakeholders strongly influence medical tourists’ decision-making process in seeking medical treatment abroad. Besides, a successful medical tourism development depends greatly on the excellent partnership between all stakeholders.

This paper sheds light on the crucial role of these stakeholders that can be an important consideration in medical tourists’ decision-making process and industry growth. The study can facilitate policymakers in designing and developing policies to improve medical tourism practices.

This paper expands the knowledge about medical tourism literature by identifying and explaining the significant role of each stakeholder in the industry. The results of this paper are quite revealing to all practitioners in terms of the potential strategies and medical tourism growth. The study establishes a foundation for future medical tourism research in the rapidly growing industry.

本文旨在根据医疗旅游的参与及其对医疗旅游发展的支持, 来确定医疗旅游的主要利益相关者。

本文系统地回顾了文献中的医疗旅游研究内容, 以识别关键的利益相关者并探讨他们在医疗旅游行业中所扮演的角色。

这项研究表明, 医疗旅游的主要利益相关者有八个：医疗游客, 医疗保健提供者, 政府机构, 促进者, 资格认证机构, 医疗保健营销人员, 保险提供者以及基础设施。这些利益相关者强烈影响医疗旅游游客在国外寻求医疗服务的决策过程。此外, 医疗旅游业的成功发展很大程度上取决于所有利益相关者之间的良好伙伴关系。

本文阐明了这些利益相关者的关键作用, 这是医疗游客决策过程和行业增长的重要考虑因素。该研究可以帮助决策者设计和制定改善医疗旅游实践的政策。

本文通过确定和解释每个利益相关者在行业中的重要作用, 扩展了对医疗旅游文献的了解。本文的结果在潜在策略和医疗旅游的增长方面对所有从业者都颇具启发性。该研究为快速发展的医疗旅游行业的未来方向研究奠定了基础。

Este artículo, tiene como objetivo abordar e identificar, los principales actores en la industria del turismo médico, en función de su participación en actividades de turismo médico y su apoyo al desarrollo del turismo médico.

El trabajo revisa sistemáticamente, la literatura y el contenido de los estudios de turismo médico para identificar a las partes interesadas, elementos clave y abordar los roles que desempeñan en la industria del turismo médico.

Este estudio muestra que los actores clave en la industria del turismo médico son ocho: turistas médicos, proveedores de atención médica, agencias gubernamentales, facilitadores, organismos de acreditación y acreditación, comercializadores de atención médica, proveedores de seguros e infraestructura e instalaciones. Estos actores, influyen de forma notable, en el proceso de toma de decisiones de los turistas médicos, al buscar tratamiento en el extranjero. Además, un desarrollo exitoso del turismo médico depende en gran medida de una excelente asociación entre todas las partes interesadas.

Este documento arroja luz sobre el papel crucial de estos actores y puede ser una consideración importante en el proceso de toma de decisiones de los turistas médicos y el crecimiento de la industria. El estudio puede facilitar, en el diseño y desarrollo de políticas para mejorar las prácticas de turismo medico, a los responsables políticos.

Este documento amplía el conocimiento sobre la literatura de turismo medico, identificando y explicando el papel importante de cada actor en la industria. Los resultados de este documento son bastante reveladores para todos los profesionales, en términos de estrategias potenciales y crecimiento del turismo médico. El estudio establece una base para futuras investigaciones sobre turismo médico en la industria de rápido crecimiento.

This research theoretically proposed and empirically validated a Customer-Based Brand Equity (CBBE) scale specifically for Medical Tourism for emerging economies including recent findings from tourism theories such as gravity model and signalling theory, but more specifically accommodating political, cultural, economic, legal and social influences.

In-depth literature reviews from tourism, medical tourism, healthcare and hospitality domains are used to propose the theoretical model. The authors have used the lavaan package in R for the empirical analysis and model verification.

The research included, tested and verified the established latent variables such as “brand awareness”, “brand association”, “perceived quality” and “loyalty”, along with new observed variables for the CBBE scale from the theoretical perspectives of this research. “Infrastructure” has emerged as a new scale construct and “culture” was found to be a moderating variable for “perceived quality” in the CBBE scale, which are novel additions to the literature.

The research contributed to scale refining, latent construct assessment, and fine-tuning of the observed variables for the mentioned theoretical gaps.