ABSTRACT
Consumers admiring the beauty standards of other countries are approaching cosmetic surgery medical tourism. This study examines the roles of hospitals and facilitating agents as the main entities of cosmetic surgery medical tourism. 334 Chinese patients who underwent cosmetic surgery in Korea were collected and structural equation modeling is used to analyze the data. The results show that a hospital's service quality in terms of tangibles, assurance, and empathy affect customers' attitudes toward medical tourism for cosmetic surgery, which in turn, influences satisfaction with medical tourism. More importantly, facilitating agents' service quality moderates the effects of hospitals' service quality dimensions on service satisfaction. Findings extend the existing literature on medical tourism by identifying the roles of hospitals and facilitating agents to enhance customers' attitudes and satisfaction with respect to collaborative service provision. Moreover, this research provides the first empirical evidence for the facilitating agents' role in determining satisfaction with medical tourism.
Subject(s)
Medical Tourism , Surgery, Plastic , China , Hospitals , Humans , Republic of KoreaABSTRACT
Understanding healthcare performance from the patient's perspective has attracted more attention from the scholars and practitioners as consumers are becoming the driving force to the innovation of healthcare delivery in the knowledge economy (Morath 2003; Scott 2003). However, most of the studies have been constrained in the methods by which the clinical professionals assess what they perceived as the patient's value. This research attempts to examine the constructs for the conceptualization of patient value and its relationship with patient satisfaction. The results indicate that the providers' skills and knowledge and their respectful communication with the patients are the most important. These attributes followed by the providers' level of empathy and attention and the physical environment factors.
