A sustainable medical tourism framework based on the enterprise architecture design: The case in Thailand

Abstract

© 2018 the Author(s). All rights reserved. Presently, medical tourism is a rapidly growing business in Thailand, while sustainable medicine is still being widely used as the basis for health policies. To improve the quality of life of people through holistic management, Enterprise Architecture (EA) is used as the strategic management concept in accordance with digital disruption. EAcombines both business and technology to align policies and establish governance. This paper presents a medical tourism framework based on the EA concept for sustainable development in Thailand. This novel framework has been developed both through comprehensive literature review as well as requirement analysis based on the i* model consisting of five layers including leadership, business, application, data, and technology. Moreover, the i* model is used to prove a relationship between the entities, especially the key stakeholders, the standards, and the compliance for each layer. The content validity and the kappa statistic were used for quantitative evaluation. This framework demonstrates that technology would contribute to enhance the medical tourism industry through the layers of data and application. Furthermore, the interoperability standard for health services, preventive medicine, and wellness activities are important for business layers. The proposed framework would generate advantages for the government in terms of good governance, transparency as well as process improvement.