Patient Satisfaction

Patient as a Consumer

The last few years health systems have revamped the way of delivering care, patient have become the center of focus and new organizational models have been applied in order to provide patient-oriented services. Marketing experts are aware that consumers make their decision about utilization of services on the basis of their perception of the service rather than the reality and hence marketing and patient satisfaction have become of paramount importance as mouth-to-mouth publicity and personal referral is the most common and influential cause of using a particular health facility. Healthcare facility is very difficult to measure; hence, it is a challenge to a healthcare provider to influence a patient’s perception of quality of care. A patient's satisfaction may not be totally influenced by the quality of physician available, but it reflects how the medical care has been delivered. To provide the highest level of satisfaction that is profitable to both the patient and the provider, management must control both the perception of expectation and the quality of delivery of the healthcare services. Knowledge of expectation and the factors affecting them, combined with knowledge of actual and perceived healthcare quality, provides the necessary information for designing and implementing programs to satisfy patients. With the advancement in technology and stiff competition, hospitals are always striving for improvement in their services. Patient expectations are constantly changing, so what satisfies a patient at one point in time may not satisfy him at some later date. As you improve your service levels on some patient satisfaction ‘attributes,’ you will change patient expectations on the remaining attributes.