International Standards for Medical Tourism: A Systematic Review of Iranian Hospitals’ Status

The awareness of the current compliance of Joint commission international standards is a prerequisite for their upgrading. The purpose of this study was to provide a systematic review of the evaluation of Iranian hospitals in accordance with International Joint Commission standard.

The present systematic review was conducted in 2019. Data were gathered by searching the Google Scholar, Scopus, PubMed, and Web of science databases. Search keywords were “medical tourism”, “health tourism”, “joint commission international”, “JCI”, “Hospital”, “medical center” and “Iran”. The search protocol was limited to 2009-2019.

The findings showed that the average compliance of patient-based standards was about 68.89% and the average adherence to organization-based standards was about 69.05%. Also, the most compliance with patient-based standards was related to “Anesthesia and Surgical Care”, while the least adherence to them belonged to the area of “Patient and Family Rights”.

According to the results of the study, Iran’s medical tourism standards are not universally desirable; authorities are recommended to focus on continual improvement of their reliability and removal of their weaknesses. In this regard, strategies such as developing a comprehensive and mandatory national qualification program and evaluating its periodic performance in this field are suggested.