ASIA LIFE SCIENCES Supplement 15(3): 2073-2081, 2018

The Asian International Journal of Life Sciences

Advancement strategies toward the Chinese market

in Korean medical tourism industry

F eng Jing1 and C hae-Kwan Lim 2*

As the scale of world-wide medical tourism markets has radically exploded, China has
centered especially in Asian district’s expansion. With this world-wide trend, the interest in
tourism development related to medical industry has recently enhanced. As a result, some
nearby southeast-Asian countries in Asia such as Thailand abd Singapore has already activated
medical tourism, producing income increase and creating employment. Recently, Korea has
been evaluated as a newborn eye-catching medical tourism country, and ranked 7th among 9
Asian medical tourism countries in preference surveys. In addition, Korea is also assessed as
one of the highest advanced countries in the medical level and technology, so it is urgent to
develop and support strategies to realize its high-quality potential. Especially with Chinese
rapid growth in economy and the number of the rich, the number of people to get advanced
medical treatments through medical tourism in medically-advanced foreign countries has
distinctively increased. Among them, many have visited Korea for medical tourism. As the
number of medical tourism visitors has largely increased, we may expect the possibility
to procure a considerable market occupation in medical tourism if we take advantage of
high-leveled medical technology and geographical approachability of Korea. Considering
all the situations and reviewing literature and previous studies related to medical tourism,
this research points out our current competitive power and problems in terms of medical
tourism characteristics and current situations of Korean/world-wide medical tourism. After
that, drawing ways such as cooperative involvements and advancements for medical service/
tourism complexes, wellness tourism utilization, human resource development system
setting, and four strategies for the advancement into Chinese markets, we finally suggest
implications to advance actively into Chinese markets and to make a big progress of Korean
medical tourism industry.

Keywords: medical tourism industry, medical service, Chinese medical market, wellness
tourism, advancement strategy

1
PG Scholar, Department of Business Administration, Tongmyong University, Busan, Korea
e-mail: jingfengkorea@naver.com
2
Associate Professor, Department of Distribution Management, Tongmyong University, Busan, Korea
*
Corresponding author: e-mail - cklim@tu.ac.kr

Received 25 March 2018; Accepted 15 April 2018

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