Evaluation and selection of Medical Tourism sites: A rough AHP based MABAC approach

High costs of treatment, long waiting time, affordability of airfares to overseas destinations and favorable exchange rate change are crucial factors related to the fast growth of Medical Tourism (Connell, 2006). Rapid development of medical infrastructure with international standards and certification, easy availability of skilled manpower bring South Asian countries like Thailand, Malaysia, and India at the forefront in this area. With current annual growth of 13.0 percent, the Indian health care sector contributes about $ 23 billion (nearly 4 percent of GDP) to the Indian economy, with'foreign exchange earning around $1.8 billion' (Chakraborty, 2006). Although research studies are abundant focusing on social impacts of Medical Tourism, there is no proper methodology for customers, both foreign and domestic, to assess the medical tourist destination in any country. The problem can be solved by taking the interest of stakeholder's in assessing the weights of a multiple criteria set, namely medical infrastructure, logistics service providers, 1 government policy along with city demography. Therefore, assessment of desirable medical destination selection and evaluation problem can be considered decision making problem with multiple attributes varying from consumer demands to resource constraints of medical related industry. In this regard, MCDM has become a very crucial area of management research and decision theory with lots of methods developed, extended and modified in solving problems in the present and past few decades.