A classifying and rankings selection of medical tourism services and patients' satisfaction in Malaysia

The study is conducted in order to determine the determinant factors of patients ‟satisfaction in medical tourism services. The iampling location was domestic and cross-border medical tourism in Pulau Pinang, Kuala Lumpur and Selangor state and 92 target samples were selected to involve in this study. Fuzzy Analytic Hierarchy Process (FAHP) was one of the quality improvement methods for high medical tourism. However, there is a limitation for FAHP to identify the patients‟ satisfaction. The Kano Model provided a way to better understand of patients‟ satisfaction through the Kano Quality Attribute categories. Thus, the integration approach of Kano Model and FAHP is proposed in this study. The study is identifying the determinant factors of patients‟ satisfaction requirements in medical tourism services was first obtained. Next, the study is measured patients‟ satisfaction using Kano and classified them into Six Groups: Must-be; Attractive; One-Dimensional; Indifferent; Reverse; and Questionable. Finally, the study is ranked the determinant factors of patients‟ satisfaction requirements in order of importance using Fuzzy AHP to prioritize the most important patients‟ satisfaction requirement based on expert opinions. Conventional AHP is integrated with fuzzy set theory to capture the uncertainty and ambiguity of patients while concluding judgments. Results indicate that one-dimensional attributes gain the largest weights followed by attractive attributes where “medical service cost”, “transparency of cost” and “fast delivery” are the first, second and third attributes with weights of 0.159, 0.134 and 0.124, respectively. The findings from the study able to benefits the medical decision maker to design and improve the medical tourism to enhance patients‟ satisfaction in the medical tourism services based on the most important patients‟ satisfaction requirement.