Enriching healthcare service quality by leveraging service experiences in Indian private hospitals: application of fuzzy-AHP approach

Abstract

PurposeOver the years, despite the best efforts to evaluate service quality through multiple techniques, the connotation between service deliverance and consumer expectation remains sporadic. In the quest to quantify service quality from an innovative perspective, the current study has leveraged consumer-perceived experiences to unveil the novel intricacies of healthcare quality.Design/methodology/approachAnchoring on the dimensions of patient experience (PX), field data were collected from 244 patients at different private hospitals operating across India. Further, this study incorporated a fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (F-AHP) to evaluate consumer preferences and prioritised the dimensions of PX in three categories of Indian hospitals, namely nursing homes (NHs), mid-tier corporate hospitals (MCHs) and top-tier corporate hospitals (TCHs).FindingsThe results establish a performance ranking by demonstrating that MCHs outperform the rest alternatives on the grounds of perceived experiences. Tukey's honestly significance difference (HSD) test was executed to confirm the heterogeneity among the participants' preferences across three different hospital categories. The results reveal that for most of the alternatives, the mean scores of the criterion were statistically significantly different.Originality/valueIn healthcare studies, PX dawned as an entity with an ability to propel healthcare quality in a better way than the classical techniques did. The study's findings present a comprehensive picture of a care delivery system by identifying relatively significant dimensions of PX, hence improving the quality quotients by adjusting healthcare offerings in alignment with consumer expectations and organisational strategies.

Performance measurement of factors affecting consumer experience in healthcare services using fuzzy and grey techniques

“…Traditional healthcare methods have conditioned both organizations and providers to exclude patients from a larger care context, as this may distract physicians from their primary purpose of delivering equitable care (Ling et al, 2021). Also, increased attention to patient expectations, needs and convenience may inflate healthcare costs, slow process time and employee burnout, which could prove detrimental to overall service performance (Ling et al, 2021;Senapati and Panda, 2023a). Hence, amidst operational obscurities, it is vital to identify relatively weaker as well as stronger elements of consumer experience that critically affect organizational performance.…”

“…While the healthcare industry is poised to establish sustainable business practices, policymakers face serious challenges in solving patients' expectations and perceptual gaps arising from institutional barriers (Zakkar et al, 2022). Capitalizing on this shifting trend, private hospitals (especially corporate hospitals) extend certain degrees of clinical control to their consumers, attempting personalization and intensification of inpatient care (Senapati and Panda, 2023a). It is also asserted that acknowledging consumer experiences alongside consumer preferences provides a holistic picture of healthcare quality and widens organizational capability (Al-Tannir et al, 2017;Ponsignon et al, 2020).…”

Prioritizing customer requirements for men’s denim jeans through factor analysis and fuzzy analytic hierarchy process

“…Recently, the fuzzy AHP approach has gotten wider application in different areas such as ranking sustainability drivers (Arora et al, 2020), crowdfunding benefits (Gupta et al, 2023), barriers of integrated lean six sigma implementation (Yadav and Desai, 2017) and risks in decentralized finance (Kaur et al, 2023). It was also widely applied to prioritize CRs in various sectors such as the factors that influence purchase intention for organic foods (Arora et al, 2022a), the factors that influence user intention for e-hailing apps (Arora et al, 2022b), the dimensions of patient experience of health service quality (Senapati and Panda, 2023), and the Prioritizing CRs for men's denim jeans factors influencing customers' experiences with AI-enabled finance service (Arora et al, 2023). Attributed to its good ranking performance, the fuzzy AHP, integrated with Kano's model (Singh et al, 2020) and Markov modelling (Gotzamani et al, 2018), has been used in the QFD process to design products that meet CRs.…”

“…, 2022a), the factors that influence user intention for e-hailing apps (Arora et al. , 2022b), the dimensions of patient experience of health service quality (Senapati and Panda, 2023), and the factors influencing customers’ experiences with AI-enabled finance service (Arora et al. , 2023).…”

“…In this paper, a comprehensive list of denim jeans CRs were identified, screened and prioritized. Furthermore, the prioritization was performed through the fuzzy analytic hierarchy process (AHP) which has been recently used to rank CRs in several other sectors (Arora et al, 2022a(Arora et al, , b, 2023Gupta et al, 2023;Senapati and Panda, 2023). Accordingly, the current study attempted to answer the following research questions.…”