Ranking Hospital Hoteling Services from Patients’ Perspective Using Importance-Performance Analysis

While the ultimate goal of health care is to maintain or improve the health status, features of care, including the quality of hotel services, are important to enhance the quality of health care services. Due to the limited resources of the health system, it is important to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of health service providers for policy-making and allocating resources in line with customers’ expectations.

The current study aimed at ranking the dimensions of hospital hoteling services from patients’ perspectives using the importance-performance analysis (IPA) method in Tehran, Iran.

In this cross-sectional study, 440 patients were enrolled through multi-stage random sampling. The data collection tool was a questionnaire consisting of 44 items in six dimensions. Its internal reliability was determined based on Cronbach’s alpha coefficient (α = 0.97). The IPA method was used to prioritize the dimensions. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and the paired t-test at a significance level of < 0.05.

In all aspects of hoteling, there was a significant difference between the performance of hospitals and the expectations of patients. The highest and lowest gaps between performance and expectation were related to the economic-financial and performance-process factors, respectively (P < 0.05). Based on the IPA matrix, the "physical-structural" and "economic-financial" factors were the major weaknesses, and the "need to allocate more resources" and "human-behavioral" factors were recognized as the most strong points. Considering that the dimensions of "cultural-religious” and "safety-security" were located in the third quadrant of the IPA matrix, these dimensions did not require additional resources.

The existence of a gap between hospital performance and patient expectation in all the hoteling dimensions indicated that the performance of hospitals in providing hoteling services was not proportional to the importance of these factors from the viewpoints of patients. The "physical-structural" and "economic-financial" factors were the major weaknesses of the hospitals studied. Therefore, it is necessary to pay more attention and allocate resources to these dimensions. Efforts should be continued to maintain and upgrade the status quo regarding the human-behavioral factors to boost patient satisfaction and improve the quality of hoteling services.