Prof. Lee, with a co-author Richard Staelin (Duke University's Fuqua School of Business), analyzed a set of 317 thousand Google reviews of U.S. acute care hospitals.

The output of these analyses shows that non-clinical factors, such as kind doctors and staff and clean facilities, have roughly twice the impact on patient satisfaction compared to clinical factors, like diagnosis and treatment outcomes.

Evaluation of each factor was independent from each other and often patients had ‘mixed’ evaluation where some factors were positively evaluated while others were negatively evaluated.

Furthermore, patients did not evaluate hospital services by separating specific staffs (doctors, nurses, or other employees), or different departments (ER, surgery, billing, etc.). Instead, patients assessed their satisfaction based on their overall perception of the service received from the entire team of staffs providing the hospital care.

These findings have important implications for understanding the voice of the customers for hospitals and other businesses. While clinical factors are important for increasing patient satisfaction, non-clinical factors are also crucial, so hospitals should make strategic decisions on which aspects to invest in depending on the feedback received from the patients.

The methodology used in this paper can serve as a simple roadmap for analyzing the massive amount of online customer feedback, which can help firms better understand their customer satisfaction and address areas that need improvement.

Journal: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11002-024-09738-2