Improving patients loyalty: A guide for healthcare service providers and policy makers

ABSTRACT

Objectives: This study aims to identify the factors affecting hospital choice decisions of patients, to categorize the decision-makers involved in the selection of hospitals, and to predict patients’ repurchase intention model based on identified factors for tertiary-level healthcare services. Methodology: Data were collected from in-patients of multispecialty hospitals located in northern India. Factor analysis and linear discriminant analysis techniques have been used to analyze the data. Findings: Study has revealed that factors that affect hospital choice decisions are basic amenities, fame and quality, building and infrastructure, ease and affordability, personal substances, responsiveness of services, recommendations and suggestions, clinical support, privacy and information sharing, and range of services. It has been found that family member and doctors individually or jointly, friends/relatives, and patients themselves take decisions to choose the hospitals. Study has also resulted in a model consisting of linear discriminant equation to predict patients’ repurchase intentions for the services of same hospitals.

KEYWORDS:

• Consumer choices
• decision-making
• healthcare
• patients Loyalty
• repurchase intentions
• service quality

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vishal Kamra

Vishal Kamra is a seasoned academician and researcher with a track record of publishing high quality research papers. His doctorate research work demonstrates the behavior of healthcare consumers in the marketplace. He is on the editorial and reviewer boards of various reputed journals. His research interest areas are consumer behavior, healthcare and service quality. He regularly interacts with healthcare service providers and patients to understand various health related problems and attempts to provide practical possible solutions at organizational as well as individual level.