Factors Influencing Chinese Customers’ Selection of Health Care Service Countries

• 발행기관: 한국유통과학회
• 저자명: 장준(Jun Zhang) 이훈영(Hoon-Young Lee)
• 간행물 정보: 『유통과학연구(JDS)』제13권 제12호, 41~52쪽, 전체 12쪽
• 주제분류: 경제경영 > 경제학
• 파일형태: PDF
• 발행일자: 2015.12.30

영문 초록

Purpose – Given globalization, the new niche market of medical tourism is likely to experience sustainable growth for various reasons, such as aging populations and a shift in the medical consumerism paradigm toward prevention. Importantly, understanding medical customers’ behavior is necessary to benefit from a competitive advantage in this industry. The existing research primarily accessed the key factors of medical quality and costs to explain health customers’ behavior but is limited in terms of enabling an understanding of the decision process. This limitation exists because, given the intangibility and greater associated risks in the highly professional industry of international medical tourism, most customers lack the knowledge and experience needed to evaluate the central factors—such as the medical competence of health care countries—before purchases. Therefore, they actively search for useful information through various distributions to reduce uncertainty and to make better choices. Interestingly, most of these information channels are associated with word-of-mouth (WOM). However, no evidence is found in the literature to estimate the effect of WOM in the medical tourism field. Thus, this study focuses on WOM to explore its interaction with key medical characteristic factors and the attractiveness of destinations referred to by sources. This study also affects customers’ evaluations and, in turn, influences their intention to seek health care services abroad. Research design, data, and methodology – The literature review addressed an interesting research model for estimating the relations among WOM, medical characteristics, attractiveness, and customers’ choice intention regarding international health care. In the key economic regions in China, such as Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu, Shandong, and Guangdong, 2,500 survey questionnaires were distributed to potential customers of different ages, education, and income levels. A resu

목차

1. 서 론

2. 선행연구 고찰

3. 연구방법론

4. 연구결과

5. 연구결과 토론 및 시사점

References

키워드

Word-of-Mouth Medical Characteristics Travel Attractiveness Choice Intention.