Factors influencing medical tourism adoption in Malaysia: A DEMATEL-Fuzzy TOPSIS approach

Tourism is one of the biggest competitive industries in the world. Nowadays, medical tourism is quickly developing as a part of tourism for health and wellness care. There are many factors influencing the development of medical tourism in developing countries. This research aims to identify those factors for medical tourism development in Malaysia. We investigate the factors from the literature to develop a new decision-making model. We use two multi-criteria decision making techniques, Decision Making Trial and Evaluation Laboratory (DEMATEL) and Fuzzy Order of Preference by Similarity to Ideal Solution (Fuzzy TOPSIS), to reveal the interrelationships among the factors and to find the relative importance of these factors in the decision making model. The results showed that human and technological factors are the most important factors for medical tourism adoption in Malaysia. The results of this study will enable key players in the medical tourism industry to potentially assign investments for medical tourism in the developing countries.