Track: Healthcare Operations and Services

Abstract

Hospitals are increasingly shifting their online review strategy from active listening to proactive engagement by ensuring proper response to patients. The patient perspective is increasingly recognized as the central pillar of quality in healthcare industry. Working condition in public hospitals has been of great concern worldwide for healthcare personnel. Also, due to poor review of a hospital, financial performance is gradually deteriorating which leads to migration of healthcare personnel. Reviews of and responses from hospitals vary in different regions of the world, thereby process of ranking of hospitals is bounded to a specific region. Quality assurance and improvement are crucial factors for an efficient healthcare system. This study investigates the joint effect of management response and online reviews on financial performance of hospitals by concentrating on three areas of concern. First, how variation in management response both within a hospital and on peer review site affects the motivation of healthcare personnel and attracts more patients. Second, a cyclic link depicting the interrelationship among four major domains: rating, management response, financial performance and recommendation has been shown. Third, a generic model is proposed and an analysis has been done to introduce the concept of region specific factor. A k-score value of around 93% is obtained for the final model. Also, a case study on Indian hospitals is performed to depict the sufficiency of the model.