Halal Branding for Medical Tourism

Abstract

This chapter explores the emergence and development of Halal branded hospitals and medical facilities as a product of Medical Tourism for Muslim patients around the world and in India. Halal tourism is a sub-category of spiritual tourism, where one has to abide by the Sharia law to satisfy Muslim customers. The main objective of the chapter is to focus on a niche category of halal medical tourism, where Sharia rules are followed to attract the medical tourist mainly from Islamic countries. This chapter also proposes a typology of Muslim medical tourist's cultural sensitivities and recommends branding and certifying Halal Medical Tourism hospitals, healthcare facilities, pharmaceuticals, products, and services to attract Muslim patients, and provides challenges and opportunities with future research directions. The case studied in this chapter is of the Global Health City, the first Halal Certified Medical Hospital facility in Chennai, India. It presents a model for halal branding of Indian Medical Tourism based on the halal decision-making paradigm for Muslim customers designed by Wilson and Liu (2010). The model presented here indicates attitudes of being rational or emotional and elements reflecting affective and cognitive feelings for Muslim patients seeking halal treatment in halal hospitals.

Bibliometrix analysis of medical tourism

“…Table 3 identifies the authors and their publications in the 20 top rankings. Analyzing the table, Demicco is the author with the highest number of publications, [28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40] fifteen, followed by Connel 1,2,41-46 and Han [47][48][49][50][51][52][53][54][55] with nine publications, Medhekar [56][57][58][59][60] and Na with seven, Frederick, 61-67 Gan, [62][63][64][65][66][67] Smith, [68][69][70][71][72][73] Cooper 25,[74][75][76][77][78] and with six and Eto [79][80][81]…”

A conceptual model of medical tourism service supply chain

“…Demand for medical tourism is defined as request for medical services, at a particular destination, at a given price and time (Medhekar & Haq, 2015). An effective DM process requires an understanding of the overall medical tourism experience and an effective synchronization between supply chain partners (Medhekar & Haq, 2015). Rahman and Zailani (2017) report trust as an important determinant in generating medical tourism demand.…”

“…Rahman and Zailani (2017) report trust as an important determinant in generating medical tourism demand. There are studies in medical tourism literature focusing on increasing demand for halal medical tourism services (Medhekar & Haq, 2015;Rahman & Zailani, 2017), and studying various host countries' demand patterns (Lin et al, 2009;Genc, 2012;Johnson & Garman, 2015;Loh, 2015;Vetitnev, Kopyirin & Kiseleva, 2016;Dang, Huang, Wang & Nguyen, 2016;Tang & Lau, 2017;Tang & Abdullah, 2018).…”

“…The typical suppliers in an MTSSC are medical service providers, assistance companies providing medical consultancy, tour services providers offering tourist activities, accommodation providers, flight ticket suppliers, transportation/transfer service providers, translation service providers, and insurance and visa providers (Medhekar & Haq, 2015;Rahman & Zailani, 2017). In a MTSSC, members conduct business activities collaboratively and act as providers to each other.…”

“…Furthermore, a healthcare professional should inform patients during a medical intervention about the examination process in order to comfort the patients. Muslimfriendly medical tourism is a special case, in which understanding Islamic cultural sensitivities is an essential point for SDM and CaRM (Medhekar & Haq, 2015). For instance, Muslim female patients request female health professionals (Iranmanesh et al, 2018).…”