ANALYSIS OF BARRIERS IN MEDICAL TOURISM DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC

Abstract

Medical tourism is emerging both as a business and as an academic research area that provides patients access to medical institutions for treatment/rehabilitation outside their country of residence. Since the transnational medical travels are interrupted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the medical tourism, especially the mostly requested elective low-risk treatments like dentistry, laser eye surgery, esthetics and hair transplantation are almost come to a standstill. Therefore, this study aims to identify the barriers to the development and execution of medical tourism during the COVID-19 Pandemic and to analyze the causal relationships between these barriers. In order to that, text mining and Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) analysis were conducted. Text mining was applied to the medical tourism related tweets in English from January to June 2020 via RapidMiner software and the current barriers in medical tourism were identified. The relationships between these barriers were examined via expert evaluations. Interpretive Structural Modeling (ISM) was applied to construct a structural model of the barriers that presents how the barriers are related and the hierarchy between them. According to the hierarchical structure the prominent obstacles were: restrictions on transportation, disruption of hospital operations, increasing complexity of medical tourism services and unexpected fluctuations in exchange rates. The main contributions of the study can be listed as: determining the barriers to medical tourism under pandemic conditions by using text mining, and the analysis of the relationships between these barriers with interpretive structural modeling and revealing the root barriers.

Keywords

• Medical tourism
• Barrier Analysis
• Text mining
• Interpretive Structural Modeling

PANDEMİ DÖNEMİNDE MEDİKAL TURİZM ENGELLERİ ANALİZİ

Abstract

Kişilerin ikamet ettikleri ülke dışında tedavi / rehabilitasyon görmek için tıbbi kurumlara erişimlerini sağlayan medikal turizm, hem iş hem de araştırma alanı olarak son yıllarda gittikçe artan bir şekilde dikkat çekmektedir. Uluslararası tıbbi seyahatlerin COVID-19 salgınına yönelik önlemler kapsamında kesintiye uğramasıyla, medikal turizm kapsamındaki diş tedavisi, lazer göz ameliyatı, estetik ve saç ekimi gibi isteğe bağlı ve düşük risk taşıyan tedavilere olan talep de duraklamıştır. Bu bağlamda bu çalışma, pandemi döneminde medikal turizm ile ilgili engelleri tespit etmeyi ve bu engeller arasındaki nedensel ilişkileri analiz etmeyi amaçlamaktadır. Çalışmada yöntem olarak metin madenciliği ve Yorumlayıcı Yapısal Modelleme analizlerine başvurulmuştur. RapidMiner yazılımının kullanımıyla, medikal turizm ile ilgili Ocak-Haziran 2020 arasında atılan twitter metinleri incelenmiş ve medikal turistler tarafından ifade edilen engel ve zorluklar belirlenmiştir. Engeller arasındaki yapısal etkileşim uzman değerlendirmeleri aracılığıyla Yorumlayıcı Yapısal Modelleme ile değerlendirilmiş ve son olarak bu engellerin birbirini nasıl etkilediği ve aralarındaki hiyerarşik ilişki ortaya konmuştur. Buna göre öne çıkan engeller ulaşıma getirilen kısıtlamalar, hastanelerin işleyişinin aksaması, medikal turizm hizmetlerinin işleyişinin karmaşıklaşması ve döviz kurlarında beklenmedik dalgalanmalar olmuştur: Çalışmanın ana katkıları metin madenciliği kullanılarak Pandemi koşullarında medikal turizmin önündeki engellere dikkat çekilmesi ve engeller arası ilişkilerin yorumlayıcı yapısal modelleme ile analizinin ardından kök engellerin ortaya konmasıdır.

Keywords

• Medikal turizm
• Engel Analizi
• Metin madenciliği
• Yorumlayıcı Yapısal Modelleme

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