A study on medical services quality and its influence upon value of care and patient satisfaction – Focusing upon outpatients in a large-sized hospital

The quality of medical services provided to patients affects hospital performance under severe competition amongst large-sized hospitals and increases the rights of patients. A hospital, specifically a large-sized one, can demonstrate successful performance when it satisfies the factors of quality a customer expects, enhances the value of care and invests its resources to improve the factors of quality. This study explores the factors of quality affecting the value of care and patient satisfaction, and tests the correlations among the value of care, patient satisfaction and intention to re-visit. Large-sized hospitals that increase the value of care and patient satisfaction ensure patients will re-visit and also increase revenue by taking the above factors into consideration. This study uses interview data obtained from outpatients in a large-sized university hospital located in Seoul, Korea with approximately 1000 hospital beds. In addition, this study uses the causal relationship model for the analysis. The purposes of this study are to: (i) to analyse the utility of established factors of service quality discovered in the studies of service quality when measuring the quality of medical services in large-sized hospitals, (ii) to examine systematically the correlations amongst the quality of medical services, value of care, satisfaction level and re-visit intention, and (iii) to suggest marketing implications for large-sized hospitals to offer patients effective medical services based upon the results of this study.

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