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This study aims to explore how the treatment, well-being and satisfaction of health tourists are affected by what is characterized as the hospitality culture of health care.

A qualitative research design focusing on in-depth semi-structured interviews was conducted with 28 Omani health tourists who visited Iran and received health-care services. Data were analyzed thematically using ATLAS.ti software.

The results revealed that a caring health professional is essential for patient healing and well-being. Cultural congruence is enhanced through effective communication between patients and health-care service providers. Additionally, a hospitality-certified workforce is essential for customer satisfaction and overall well-being. Finally, a hospitality-style approach and home-like atmosphere improve patient rehabilitation and performance.

The study’s exclusive focus on Omani health tourists necessitates caution in generalizing findings. Future research could encompass more diverse populations and inclusive samples to broaden applicability.

The study highlights the key role of hospitality culture in the health-care sector, emphasizing the significance of building a culturally sensitive and hospitable environment to improve patient satisfaction and overall well-being. This includes the creation of welcoming environments and customized health-care experiences congruent with patients’ cultural values and beliefs.

The study emphasizes the crucial role of hospitality culture in health tourism and the potential to create a culture of care and respect in health-care settings, addressing patients’ holistic needs beyond physical amenities and enriching the patient experience. It also applies Leininger’s Culture Care Theory to hospitality, providing a novel viewpoint on culturally congruent, safe and meaningful care for health tourists.

This study aims to examine the role of Islamic economic and social institutions during Covid-19 and try to propose a model that highlights Islamic economics and social institutions’ role in providing community economic, social and health recovery support.

This research uses a qualitative approach with a multicase method. Interviews with the institutions including the Amil Zakat, Islamic Banks, Micro Waqf Banks and Islamic Cooperative (Baitul Maal wat Tamwil) were conducted in order to develop a model about how the integration between each institution in handling the effect of COVID-19.

The model shows the interaction roles of each Islamic institution and implementation in the long term and short term in handling the impact of Covid-19, particularly in the economic, social and health sectors. These institutions will assist the government in establishing community economic independence in the face of COVID-19, which has caused economic sluggishness or recession.

This study proposes the model of synergy using a qualitative approach. Future studies can develop the synergy model by employing a statistical and quantitative method, such as by employing analytical network process method.

This study adds the literature about empirical evidence on the role of each Islamic economic and social institution and develops new scenario model about integration of those institutions in overcoming economic and social problems during the COVID-19 pandemic. These interactions play a role in shaping the community’s economic independence in dealing with the economic downturn due to COVID-19.

The purpose of this study is to comprehensively examine the ethical implications surrounding generative artificial intelligence (AI).

Leveraging a novel methodological approach, the study curates a corpus of 364 documents from Scopus spanning 2022 to 2024. Using the term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) and structural topic modeling (STM), it quantitatively dissects the thematic essence of the ethical discourse in generative AI across diverse domains, including education, healthcare, businesses and scientific research.

The results reveal a diverse range of ethical concerns across various sectors impacted by generative AI. In academia, the primary focus is on issues of authenticity and intellectual property, highlighting the challenges of AI-generated content in maintaining academic integrity. In the healthcare sector, the emphasis shifts to the ethical implications of AI in medical decision-making and patient privacy, reflecting concerns about the reliability and security of AI-generated medical advice. The study also uncovers significant ethical discussions in educational and financial settings, demonstrating the broad impact of generative AI on societal and professional practices.

This study provides a foundation for crafting targeted ethical guidelines and regulations for generative AI, informed by a systematic analysis using STM. It highlights the need for dynamic governance and continual monitoring of AI’s evolving ethical landscape, offering a model for future research and policymaking in diverse fields.

The study introduces a unique methodological combination of TF-IDF and STM to analyze a large academic corpus, offering new insights into the ethical implications of generative AI across multiple domains.

The primary objective of this research is to introduce a pioneering takaful model that provides both provision and protection to the aging population by combining the concept of cash waqf with takaful. This model is designed to align with Shariah principles, ensuring sustainability and enduring impact.

This research adopts a qualitative methodology, where a focus group discussion was conducted with six stakeholders. The participants consisted of takaful operators, legal experts and other industry players. The participants were presented with the proposed cash waqf takaful model and their feedback was recorded. Legal issues related to linking waqf with takaful were also identified and discussed.

The study highlights the need for innovative financial solutions to support Malaysia's aging population. It proposes a cash waqf takaful model, leveraging crowd funding for sustainability. Legal hurdles and recommendations for overcoming them are discussed, along with suggestions for future research on quantitative validation and regulatory frameworks. Ultimately, the study emphasizes the holistic approach of the proposed model in addressing the well-being of Malaysia's senior citizens.

The proposed takaful model presents opportunities for takaful operators to integrate Islamic social finance into their operations, enabling easier access to takaful for the elderly community. By eliminating financial barriers, it can transform the takaful landscape, ensuring inclusivity and financial security for aging populations. Moreover, policymakers see it as a blueprint for sustainable financial solutions and social welfare enhancement globally.

The study introduces a novel cash waqf takaful model to support Malaysia's aging population, leveraging crowdfunding for sustainability. It addresses legal challenges unique to Malaysia and proposes collaboration with State Islamic Religious Authorities. Furthermore, it emphasizes the need for further research to validate the model's effectiveness and explores its potential global policy implications.

This study evaluates the knowledge structure of medical tourism within the geographical context of South East Asia. This region is one of the growing economic powerhouses in the world, and tourism activities have contributed a lot to its advancement.

Applying a science mapping technique using bibliometric analysis, the current and emerging themes and future trends are analyzed using bibliographic coupling and co-word analysis.

Findings show that current trends produced four themes: Fundamentals of medical tourism in Southeast Asia, determinants of tourist medical tourism visits, quality of medical and health service in Southeast Asia and impact of medical tourism on national economic growth. The future trends also produced four themes related to navigating excellence in medical tourism, medical tourism and economic growth, service quality in medical tourism services and accredited destinations in the globalized era of medical tourism.

This study is relevant to all stakeholders, operators and local communities in Southeast Asia tourism destinations to provide the best medical tourism with the best quality service and technologies.

This study fills the gap by performing a bibliometric approach to reviewing medical tourism in Southeast Asia using a science mapping technique. Crucial themes are produced through topological and temporal streams that provide critical insight for future developments in medical tourism in the region.

Experiencing stigma after abortion may decelerate the accumulation of human capital. Despite the importance of studying the relationship between religiosity and abortion stigma, the topic is understudied, especially in Islamic contexts. Abortion was legalized in Iran in 2005. Under the new law, far more cases are allowed for abortion. This change provided an opportunity to explore the interplay of abortion stigma, legalization and religiosity in Iran.

Using regression analysis based on 291 completed questionnaires from two cities in Iran, this study analyzes the relation between abortion stigma level and religiosity in Iran, controlling for contextual and individual variables. The time trend is also identified. The authors use different manifestations of abortion stigma as dependent variables.

The authors found that abortion stigma and its two manifestations decreased after the new law, suggesting that its legalization might have caused abortion stigma to decrease gradually. Another finding of this study is that the correlations between abortion stigma (internalized stigma) and individual religiosity level are meaningful and positive; religious people feel higher levels of abortion stigma.

The study supports the idea that effective health regulations (in the specific case of abortion) would result in less cost/risk of social issues like stigma. Policymakers in religious societies must pay more attention to the specific case of abortion stigma since it is very important for the mental health of women who think of abortion and/or select it.

This study aims to analyse the existing literature on the utilisation of financial technology (FinTech) in the Islamic social finance (ISF) sector, focusing on tools, applications and benefits. From this study, it is to provide insights for literature or for practitioners on how FinTech can be used in ISF, such as using blockchain (tools) in waqf (application) that can help to enhance transparency and trust (benefits) with donors. It is important to explore new available tools or applications in ISF markets so that such effort can benefit the industry in promoting its growth.

A systematic literature review (SLR) was carried out using Reporting Standards for Systematic Evidence Syntheses (ROSES) which has been based on quality evaluation criteria, beginning with 41,945 entries in Scopus, 25,386 entries in the Web of Science and 1,590 entries in the Google Scholar databases and ending with 35 articles from data abstraction and analysis, all of which focus on tools, applications and benefits of FinTech in ISF sector.

This review yielded three primary themes and eleven sub-themes addressing FinTech, namely applications (four sub-themes: crowdfunding, blockchain, banking service and peer-to-peer (P2P), tools (three sub-themes: waqf, zakat and sadaqah), as well as benefits (four sub-themes: transparency, innovation, inclusiveness and efficiency).

This study emphasises on innovative application of FinTech used in ISF industry which focuses on applications, tools and benefits of FinTech to the industry. However, the findings indicate that there is plenty of room for future investigation. The current work outlines several methodological issues and concerns as well as provides recommendations for future research. Various challenges associated with FinTech applications include inadequate regulations, complex permit application procedures, misuse of FinTech for terrorist financing, the existence of fraudulent FinTech companies and consumer disputes in the FinTech sector concerning ISF. There are few in-depth studies on the possible use of FinTech models in ISF, compared to studies focusing on upcoming challenges. This study also highlights the methodological limitations in previous research efforts, which can be used to improve future studies in this area. To offer a more comprehensive analysis, additional search keywords and engines that have not been included in this study could be used in future investigations with different methodologies.

For practitioners, the paper has significant managerial consequences. The analysis provides insights into real-life opportunities, limits and solutions for improving performance management by looking at FinTech applications from a larger and more diverse perspective. The practitioners, especially the State Islamic Religious Council, can recognise the benefits of using FinTech technology in ISF (waqf, zakat and sadaqah), namely under their jurisdiction.

This systematic literature assessment identifies critical knowledge gaps that must be addressed such as the applications of FinTech that are still ambiguous, with certain applications not completely embraced in the ISF industry. This study uses SLR technique to categorise literature, identify gaps in current studies and provide recommendations for the research issue (Paul and Criado, 2020), instead of using the other previous methodology such as content analysis or qualitative review. Hence, FinTech is considered an innovative or new approach in ISF industry.

This study aims to summarize studies that compared the performance of health-care institutions led by leaders with medical background versus those with no medical background.

A systematic search was conducted on three databases: PubMed, Ovid Medline and Google Scholar to identify relevant peer-reviewed studies using the keywords “performance,” “impact,” “physician,” “medical,” “doctor,” “leader,” “healthcare institutions” and “hospital.” Only quantitative studies that compared the performance of health-care institutions led by leaders with medical background versus non-medical background were included. Articles were screened and assessed for eligibility before the relevant data were extracted to summarize, appraise and make a narrative account of the findings.

A total of eight studies were included, four were based in the USA, two in the UK and one from Germany and one from the Arab World. Half of the studies (n = 4) reported overall better health-care institutional performance in terms of hospital quality ranking such as clinical effectiveness and patient safety under leaders with medical background, whereas one study showed poorer performance. The remaining studies reported mixed results among the different performance indicators, especially financial performance.

While medical background leaders may have an edge in clinical competence to manage health-care institutions, it will be beneficial to equip them with essential management skills to optimize leadership competence and enhance organizational performance.

The exclusive inclusion of quantitative empirical studies that compared health-care institutional performance medical and non-medical leaders provides a clearer link between the relationship between health-care institutional performance and the leaders’ background.

Hospital governance accountability structures in Iran, similar to other countries, have undergone various reforms with different goals. The current study aimed to identify the rules and regulations of the hospital governance structure in Iran and how they pay attention to accountability.

This qualitative document content analysis study was conducted using hospital governance structure documents in Iran using the Ready materials, Extract data, Analyze data and Distil (READ) document analysis framework. 2,921 documents were extracted from the official government websites of Iran. After screening, seven documents related to the hospital governance structure were selected. A directed content analysis approach was used. The findings were finally future purification matched with the original documents.

The findings showed that documents had not addressed the inclusive governance structure of the hospital comprehensively. The medical staff organization structure is not considered in the documents, and its duties are assigned to a technical or a clinical director. Most documents addressed financial accountability. The documents did not require the hospital’s governance to have an inclusive accountability structure. However, they paid more attention to the administrative and financial autonomy of hospitals.

Accountability is one of the most essential components in the hospital's governance structure. It can increase the success of hospital efficiency, effectiveness, vision and mission fulfillment. The study result can help health services policymakers and managers formulate better organization structure rules and regulations for hospital governance accountability.

This study is the first qualitative analysis of accountable governance structure documents in Iranian hospitals. We used the READ method as a comprehensive approach for document analysis.