The Impact of Reputation, Costs, and Interactive Care on Patient Satisfaction

Background. This research empirically tested the impact of hospital reputation and its cost system on the relationship between hospital’s interactive care and patient satisfaction. Methods. An anonymous, self-administrated questionnaire was distributed randomly among outpatients in five large hospitals located at Zhejiang Province, China. Controlled common method bias test was conducted to ensure that the common variance is not a major concern in data analysis. One-factor congeneric measurement was employed to test fitness of factors assigned to variables. Data were further tested for convergence validity, and internal and item reliability. SPSS v.25 software with PROCESS v.3.3 model in a bootstrap approach were used to test the mediation and moderation effects. Results. We received 1441 valid responses (valid response rate 66.6%). A total of 22 questionnaire items out of 25 items survived the factor analysis and common method bias tests. Results show significant positive correlation (ρ < 0.01) between the model’s variables, with correlation between interactive care and reputation (0.732) is the highest. The analysis indicates the hospital reputation moderates the relationship between hospital’s reputation and patient satisfaction. It also illustrates that poor payment administration may affect the patient satisfaction, but its effect is much less on the hospital’s reputation.Conclusion: This research validates two assertions of other research works. First, hospital reputation is more important factor than costs in the selection of the hospital, and second, the perception that healthcare providers with higher expenses provide better care are not true always. Further, our research gives a reason as why many patients from rural area usually manage appointments with doctors in hospitals in urban area rather than having appointment with doctor in the Rural Community hospitals, which have lower reputation.