A Study on Impact of Hospital Service Quality on Patients Behavior with Special Reference to Private Diabetic Clinics

Healthcare is one of India's largest sectors which contributes to 5.2 percent of major revenue of GDP. As far as employment is concerned the industry caters to the tune of 40 percent as in whole. Development of the industry is steady, growing in leaps and bounds. Two of the reasons for such growth is private participation and patient empowerment. This study is basically acausal research which attempts to explore impact of service quality on patient's satisfaction with special reference to private diabetic clinics. Certain multivariate statistical techniques such as exploratory cum confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling were used to realize the study objectives. The data was collected from 800 patients who needs consultation for diabetes. Few of the small and medium private clinics in Visakhapatnam were visited to meet the patients for data. The patients were asked certain questions related to service quality dimensions such as Communication, Responsiveness, Reliability, Tangibility, Empathy, Credibility, Courtesy, Security, Competence, and Access. These responses were used to measure impact of service quality over behavior of the patients. Patient's behavior was measure using certain other dimensions like Perception, Attitude and Satisfaction. The data was analyzed using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) and found that certain quality dimensions were highly significant for certain dimensions of patient behavior. The study also exhumes certain level of evidence in support of study proposition that patient's satisfaction, attitude and perception depends on their perception of service quality.