Uloga produktivnosti ustanova rehabilitacije u hrvatskom zdravstvenom turizmu : primjena Malmquist indeksa

The development of health tourism is primarily defined by global health trends, which, apart from changes in consumer attitudes towards health, include the health services personalization, implementation of new technologies and innovations as well as sustainable medical practices. The supply of health tourism has additionally intensified during COVID-19 pandemic, and thus health tourism has a great potential to become one of the leading tourism products. In accordance with mentioned developmet potential and trends to which the service providers must respond, the objective of the paper is to investigate the total factor productivity of natural spas and special hospitals for medical rehabilitation in Croatia during the period 2016-2021. This will determine whether the productivity for a given health facilities, which provide mostly medical services on the international market, has changed in the observed period, and what are the causes of possible changes. For this purpose, data envelopment analysis (DEA) and Malmquist productivity index (MI) were employed. In the observed period, total factor productivity was increased annualy by 7.96% as a result of positive technological changes of 0.55% on average, while technical efficiency was enlarged for 0.42%. Therefore, it is concluded that the analyzed health tourism facilities improved the provided services through innovations in line with the mentioned trends, with concurrent growth of relative technical efficiency, which in turn implies the enhancement of the management effectiveness in those same facilities.