COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE IN THE HEALTH SYSTEM: A COMPARATIVE APPROACH ROMANIA – TURKEY

A healthcare organization can build a sustainable competitive advantage if it continuously improves its performance, repeatedly provides quality and unique services to patients, and the sources of competitive advantage are valuable, rare, inimitable, or irreplaceable. This paper aims to explore the issues of competitive advantage in a dynamic environment for medical organizations in Romania and Turkey, by studying data from secondary sources represented by national strategies in the targeted sector and the perspective of beneficiaries. The findings of the study revealed the critical nature of realigning resources used in the unpredictable and ever-changing environment in which hospitals thrive to build a sustainable competitive advantage. Using a mixedmethod approach, this study assessed the contributions of patient and market competition characteristics to the perceived competitive advantage of beneficiaries in Romania and Turkey. Data for this study were collected mainly using a Google Forms questionnaire addressed to citizens of the two reference countries, with 237 valid responses. The results of the analysis to simultaneously examine the receptivity of the beneficiaries to the perceived competitive advantage indicated that the differentiation at the health unit level has a statistically significant value. The results join a body of literature that suggests that recipients' p