Role of Multiple Stakeholders in Value Co-creation and Effects on Medical Tourism

Abstract

Medical tourism is a continuously growing industry, and hospitals of the home country are the service providers for the foreign patients. Hospitals are focusing on quality improvement, infrastructure development, networking, and cost minimizations to attract foreign patients due to stiff competitions. Prahalad and Ramaswamy (2004) explained value co-creation, which ultimately achieved through Dialogue, Access, Risk, Transparency) DART concept. Another seminal research in this arena is the development of “service-dominant logic” concept by Vargo and Lusch (2004). The purpose of this article is to understand the collaboration of multiple stakeholders in co-creation process in the context of healthcare sector, which ultimately effects medical tourism. Our study also suggests a model that demonstrates the relationship between the factors responsible for brand co-creation in medical tourism and patient retention in multispecialty hospitals. We took help from past literatures to frame the model. Our study conceptualizes the collaboration of multiple stakeholders for value co-creation in the healthcare sector which ultimately affects Medical Tourism and proposes a framework. This study also examines role of patients and multiple stakeholders in value co-creation process and model we proposed where we explained the factors responsible for brand co-creation in medical tourism and patients’ retention. The result of the study—in line with the study performed by Dijk, Antonides, and Schillewaertz (2014), we may conclude that “co-creation has an element in marketing and branding strategies of an organization.”