Antecedents of Patient Satisfaction in Private Clinical Laboratories toward Patient Loyalty with Switching Cost and Location as Moderating Factors (An Empirical Study from Indonesia)

Abstract

BACKGROUND: Clinical laboratory services are at the forefront to support healthcare services, particularly during the pandemic of COVID-19. The increasing number of private clinical laboratories at present days indicates the increase in patient needs, causing the healthcare service provider to face challenges as people have more options. Therefore fostering patient loyalty (PL) is a crucial success factor for the business growth of clinical laboratories as healthcare providers. 
 AIM: The purpose of this study is to analyse antecedents of patient satisfaction (PS) in clinical laboratories towards PL with the switching cost (SC) and location (LO) as moderating factors.
 METHODS: This study was done as a quantitative survey, and data were obtained by a cross-sectional approach with partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) for the data analysis method. There are 266 respondents eligible as samples, who undergo the phlebotomy process in a private laboratory located within a specific area.
 RESULTS: This study demonstrated that all the 9 hypotheses supported with α: 0.05 and p < 0.05, include 6 independent variables named administrative process (AP), information availability (IA), the environment in the phlebotomy room (ER), phlebotomy process (PP), waiting time (WT) and result notification (RN) that influence PS. Patient satisfaction has been shown to have a direct effect on patient loyalty and also mediate the antecedents. Furthermore, SC and LO have demonstrated a significant effect to moderate this relationship.
 CONCLUSIONS: Patient satisfaction has been confirmed as the main construct to predict PL whereas the AP is the most important independent variable followed by IA. Clinical laboratory management should pay more attention to these antecedents in order to ensure PS and retain the clinic’s patients. The cost from the patient's perspective should be taken into account since this helps the clinical laboratory keep the patient loyal.

Linking Patient Experience to Customer Delight in the Private Laboratory Service

“…The result of this technical quality aspect is aligned with the results of the previous study's demonstrated positive effect (Levana and Antonio 2022;Khatri and Sharma 2021;Almatrafi et al 2018). This study revealed that patients mostly feel the PHP that involves interaction between the patient and the medical staff has a major role in creating their experience.…”

“…This can be seen from how the blood-taking process is carried out by medical staff; whether it makes the patient feel sick, scared, or even the patient feels nothing because the process is carried out very well, it can bring up an experience for the patient where the patient will give a good or bad description of his experience. Previous research shows a positive relationship between the PHP to patient satisfaction (Levana and Antonio 2022;Almatrafi et al 2018).…”

“…The PHP is a touch point where there is physical contact from the medical staff, and thereof an opportunity to create an impressive experience. Previous studies in clinical laboratory services have demonstrated a positive effect of PHP on patient satisfaction (Levana and Antonio 2022;Khatri and Sharma 2021;Almatrafi et al 2018). Therefore, this study attempts to extend the LabServ by adding specific antecedents as elements of service in the laboratory in the sense to integrate technical and functional aspects of services that have so far been considered separately.…”

“…While undergoing medical action, it is important to have IFC for the patient's needs in knowing their health condition as well as information about what actions they are receiving, so that patients will experience an easy or good experience when undergoing treatment. The clarity of this information can improve the PEX (Ramya and Ali 2016;Levana and Antonio 2022). Staff responsiveness, according to Norcross and Wampold (2018), is the company's ability to be carried out directly by employees to provide fast and responsive services.…”

“…Some of the previous studies were conducted in labs operated by government facilities (Hailu et al 2020;Khatri and Sharma 2021;Ramessur et al 2015), while research conducted in private labs is still limited. Few studies conducted in private labs use satisfaction measurement (Almatrafi et al 2018;Levana and Antonio 2022). However, the labs that compete with the service-excellent strategy need more than a satisfaction measurement, and researchers were challenged to explore other variables beyond satisfaction (Hefner et al 2019).…”