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Health tourism is a relatively new branch of international tourism that has developed more rapidly than other tourism sectors in recent years. This study aimed to investigate the effect of government supports on health tourism development by considering the mediating role of internal and external infrastructures.

The study population consisted of all experts of two hospitals in Iran, which are frequently visited by foreign tourists (N = 151). A questionnaire, developed by combining standard and researcher-made questionnaires, was used to collect the data. The confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) model was developed in SmartPLS 3 to test the hypotheses.

The main hypothesis test results indicated that government supports positively affect the development of health tourism. Internal and external infrastructures were also found to mediate the relationship between government supports and health tourism development. In addition, the sub-hypothesis test results showed that internal and external infrastructures are positively affected by government supports, which puts forth the development of health tourism. As the results explained, the most important aspects of internal infrastructures affected by government support were health service quality, cost of health services and applying advanced medical technologies, respectively. Also, different aspects of external infrastructures affected by government supports are as follows: economic, infrastructures and cultural factors.

This study is the first of its kind to examine the impact of both medical and non-medical factors on health tourism and signifies the crucial role of governments in the development of health tourism.

This study aims to identify enablers of belief and ethics-based marketing practices, establish relationships among the factors and present them in a hierarchical model to derive critical insights. This paper emphasizes interpretations of the in-depth interviews to decipher the market pervasiveness of the evolved model.

In-depth interviews were conducted with individuals and small groups of informed and elite respondents pursuing marketing guided explicitly by ethics and led by belief. The interview data further corroborated with the related literature contributed to specific factors. Finally, interpretive structural modeling has been implemented step by step to develop a systematic model for enablers.

This paper contributes a structural relationship of morality and ethics, strengthening faith and belief through philosophical understanding, which traverses into the actions related to societal benefits with the support of market opportunity development while bringing in value, enhancing the demand in return and establishing market pervasiveness. The crux of this paper is that the foundation of belief will reduce the hierarchy of other related factors while strengthening their interdependencies with equity to contribute to the development of the pervasiveness of the market for such organizations.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study exploring and examining the enablers contributing to belief and ethics-based organizations’ pervasiveness along with their interrelationships. The initial intrigue that led to the inquiry was evidence of the market pervasiveness of such organizations’ products and services across various streams.

This article aims to know the direction of current research based on the previous research in the last ten years (2012–2021).

Text mining was integrated with a network and content analysis as part of the mix methodological approach. The scientific articles, on the other hand, were assembled on Litmaps through web scraping. This process selected 86 articles about medical tourism published between 2012 and 2021. This study employed AntConc, RStudio and Gephi tools for data analysis and visualization.

A total of 138 articles were identified through Litmaps using web scraping and 86 studies met the criteria. The trend of medical tourism research is a positive sign for tourism and health industries; this is the beginning to recognize the importance of elaborating on these two topics. Several researchers have frequently studied issues of destination, hospital, development, quality, stakeholders, surgery, service, economics and policy. Policymakers must establish a medical tourism ecosystem to accommodate all stakeholders in this industry. This study also recommends focusing on supply and institution for medical tourism future research.

This literature review presents research trends on medical tourism in 2012–2021 based solely on articles available on the Litmaps search engine. If the time span is extended and the sources of articles are expanded there will be more literature available for analysis. The articles obtained are also only articles published in English due to the language limitations of the author.

Policymakers must establish a medical tourism ecosystem to accommodate all stakeholders in this industry. Stakeholders must work together to provide medical tourism package therefore people can get their health services while visiting available tourist areas.

The literary study of medical tourism over 10 years is considered the most recent systematic literature review.