An Hierarchical Structure Analysis of Hospital Selection Attributes

Abstract

As the competition among hospitals become intensified, hospital management is required to carry out more effective marketing and positioning of the hospital. Successful positioning of a hospital requires the knowledge about how the concrete attributes inherent in the medical service associated with the customer values that customers seek eventually in the medical service. Thus, it is required for hospital management to understand which hospital attributes should be emphasized in order to improve the customer values. The hierarchical structure of service attributes can provide valuable information about effective positioning and advertising. To obtain such knowledge, we employed the order analysis technique as an objective means-end chain method. Order analysis is useful for identifying the causal structure among attributes. Thus, we can examine the underlying causal relationship and eventually the vertical structure of hospital selection attributes. For this study, we conducted a survey to obtain 370 responses for the analysis. The result suggests that hospital management had better increase the scale of hospital, improve the services of health care providers, and modernize the hospital facilities and equipments so as to enhance customer values and eventually to lead them to recommend the hospital to others. Our findings would provide the valuable information for hospital management to develop the more effective hospital positioning and marketing strategies.