Measuring the Customer-Perceived Service Quality in Health Care Organization: A Case Study

Abstract

In today's highly competitive environment, health care organizations are increasingly realizing the need to focus on service quality as a measure to improve their competitive position. While there has been a plethora of conceptual and empirical research regarding the many complexities involved in services marketing, few endeavours have been directed towards integrating the customer's assessment into models to improve overall service quality. This article examines service quality through a case study of a health care organization in Mangalore, Karnataka, India with a tertiary health provision. The population consisted of patients aged 18-65 years and 45 patients were considered through a purposive sampling technique. The study basically started off using the grounded theory for patient of service quality and this exploration was enabled to formulate a hypothesis; to test the specific hypothesis, the descriptive approach was used. The grounded theory indentified service quality dimensions through open coding, axial coding and selective coding. The analysis was done for the assessment of overall service quality by 'doctors', 'quality of care,' 'nursing quality of care' and 'operative quality of care' and the proportion of statistically significant variance. The service quality in which operative quality of care yielded 79 per cent; doctor quality of care yielded 45.6 per cent; and nursing quality of care yielded 63.8 per cent of explanatory power.The results also indicated there is need to improve doctors' care in the case of this organization. Service attributes related to this dimension requires management attention to improve the doctors' care of quality. The article concludes by highlighting the dearth in services marketing research for service quality measurement through patient perspective in health care organizations. 2012 SAGE Publications.