Improving medical tourism services based on a hybrid MCDM model combined by DANP and VIKOR techniques

Medical tourism has become an investment focus for many Asian countries, and has successfully attracted millions of medical tourists each year. Medical tourism consists of diverse industries that can provide abundant opportunities of new businesses. However, few studies in tourism and medical cares have discussed the medical tourism services, or proposed the services quality evaluation strategies to assist in improving performance for long-term development. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to address this problem using the novel method of hybrid MCDM (multiple criteria decision-making), including DEMATEL (decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory), DANP (the DEMATEL-based analytic network process) and VIKOR, to examine the influential relationships among dimensions and criteria of the empirical case and to ultimately present the best improvement schemes, which are valuable for both practitioners and researchers.