Patient Satisfaction and Marketing Effectiveness in Selected Large Hospitals
7 Pages Posted: 15 Jan 2010
Date Written: January 15, 2010
Abstract
Over the last several years, patient satisfaction has emerged not only as a measure of how well a hospital is viewed by its patients, but also as an important way to measure treatment outcome and services quality. Satisfied patients demonstrate greater compliance with their medical care than dissatisfied patients do(Bell, Krivich, and Boyd 1997). They spend less time in the hospital and have improved outcomes that can result in cost minimization for the hospitals. Besides, in today’s highly competitive healthcare environment, a hospital’s performance in several functional areas is measured against other hospitals and hospital systems, which makes patient satisfaction measures more important than ever. Patient Satisfaction is a aggregate function of Marketing System in Hospitals.
Measuring Marketing effectiveness and patient satisfaction can help determine the overall effectiveness of care received and the healthcare system where it is delivered. These two aspects have been analysed in the ensuing paper.
300 patients and 80 marketing executives from six hospitals (three public and three private) from twin cities of Hyderabad and Secunderabad participated in this study. They were administered with a structure interview schedule and a questionnaire. Using means, standard deviations, and f-values, the results are presented. In the light of the hypothesis formulated, it was found that the private hospital patients are more satisfied with the quality of services than their counterparts. Thus, the null hypothesis is rejected.
Effectiveness is the degree to which the social system accomplishes its goals. As the concept of effectiveness is applied to the marketing as a domain of management function, its effectiveness is gauged by the extent to which the purpose of marketing function is accomplished in an organization. The second part of the paper analyses the effectiveness of healthcare marketing as perceived by the executives of the hospitals under study. The executives from private hospitals perceived their marketing function more effective than their counterparts, thus rejecting the null hypothesis. Implications for Hospital Management in view of the improvement of patient satisfaction and effectiveness of marketing function have been drawn.
Keywords: Hospital Service, Healthcare, Service Marketing
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