Health Scope. 2021 February; 10(1):e108482. Published online 2021 March 2. doi: 10.5812/jhealthscope.108482. Brief Report The Medical Tourism Industry in Iran: A Review of Websites Designed for Cross-border Patients Abdolvahab Baghbanian 1 , Reza Safdari 2 , Leila Erfannia 3, 4, * and Mojtaba Zokaee 5 1 University of Adelaide, South Australia, Australia 2 Department of Health Information Management, School of Allied Medical Sciences, Tehran University of Medical Sciences, Tehran, Iran 3 Zahedan University of Medical Sciences, Iran 4 Clinical Education Research Centre, Shiraz University of Medical Sciences, Shiraz, Iran 5 Shahid Bahonar University of Kerman, Kerman, Iran * Corresponding author: Department of Health Information Technology, Paramedical School, Zahedan University of Medical Sciences, Zahedan, Iran. Email: leila.erfannia@gmail.com Received 2020 August 12; Revised 2021 January 31; Accepted 2021 February 05. Abstract Background: Cross-border health care, whether sanctioned by the governments (out-of-country care) or initiated by the patients (medical tourism), is on the rise globally. The medical tourism industry has shown great potential for improvement in Iran. Objectives: We aimed to examine the representation of data elements on Iranian public and private medical tourism websites and evaluate their content maturity. Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional design was used to gather and statistically analyze data from 12 medical tourism websites. Results: The highest level of data representation was provided for medical tourism attractions and destinations, followed by the geographical location of hospitals and the establishment of tourist agencies. Very few websites featured data elements on admission forms. Fisher’s exact test revealed no statistically significant difference in the representation of data elements between the providers of medical tourism websites (P > 0.05). Most privately owned medical tourism websites and only one in the public sector had a moderate-content status. No website was confirmed to be rich or poor regarding their maturity. Conclusions: More investment is required for the development of information and communication technology infrastructures in the Iranian medical tourism industry to attract foreign service-users, although many other factors such as political and economic forces may be involved. Keywords: Iran, Website, Medical Tourism, Medical Tourist, Health Care, Cross Border, Data Element 1. Background Cross-border health care’ denotes a broad social phe- nomenon involving the movement of patients, providers (e.g., physicians), or services (e.g., biopsy samples) across national boundaries for health care reasons (1, 2). It en- compasses various concepts, such as medical tourism, in- bound and outbound, or incoming and outgoing medi- cal travelers (2). It may be sanctioned by the government (out-of-country-care) or initiated by the patient (medical tourism). Government-sanctioned outbound care usually involves insured procedures that create a delay that may pose catastrophic risks to the patient’s health. Medical tourism, however, is often planned and coordinated by the patients without the inclusion of a public health insurance system (1-3). It excludes emergency and unplanned care for illnesses or complementary and alternative medicine (4). It also refers to medical professionals traveling inter- nationally to provide medical services (2). Although not a new concept, medical tourism has emerged as a flour- ishing industry for medical treatment (3). In this study, the definition is confined to international visitors who con- sider going abroad to receive medical services. For many years, it has been common for people from under-developed or developing nations to travel to devel- oped countries to benefit from advanced and innovative medical services. Medical tourism has now changed this approach and incorporates bidirectional flows when peo- ple from all countries frequently travel across their inter- national frontier to obtain certain health care, which is ei- ther too delayed, inaccessible, unaffordable, unavailable, of poor quality, or legally banned at their home country (5- 7). The medical tourism industry has resulted in the forma- tion of a new class of patients, called ‘patients without bor- ders’, ‘cross-border patients’, or ‘patients with passports’ (5, 6). Copyright © 2021, Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits copy and redistribute the material just in noncommercial usages, provided the original work is properly cited.