Designing a Value Co-Creation Model for the Medical Tourism Industry in Guilan Province

Given the natural, historical, and cultural potentials of Guilan province, a key pivot of its development is tourism, among whose different forms medical tourism is of particular importance. Co-creation is a sort of marketing strategy that emphasizes the creation and recognition of values shared by an organization and customers to improve service quality and preserve and create value for customers. The present study aims to propose a value co-creation model with an emphasis on organization and customer in the medical tourism industry. The research is exploratory in nature and applied in the objective. The statistical population is composed of eight scientific and executive experts in tourism and eight medical tourists. The sampling method is purposive and snowball. Data, which were collected by semi-structured interviews, were analyzed by the grounded theory. After three steps of coding, the model of value co-creation with organization and customer was identified as a paradigm. The validity and reliability of the data were checked by a combination of validity measurement methods and the test-retest method. Based on the results, the strategies of organizational value co-creation were considered to include the medical tourism mix as the pivotal phenomenon, medical tourism potentials as causal conditions, and medical tourism infrastructure as contextual factors. Customer value co-creation including resources, motivations, and interactions of tourists and customer value co-creation behavior including loyalty and citizen behavior were considered as the consequences of the model.