A study for the relationship between the cognition difference and satisfaction for the medical service and the revisiting

의료서비스의 인식차이와 만족이 재방문에 미치는 영향에 관한 연구

Due to the dramatic and situational change in medical industry, it has became very important to keep existing patients and to attract new patients by monitoring the medical consumer's expectation and various needs and ensuring the patients' satisfaction. This study regards the patients' satisfaction as the final object of medical service. So the object of this study is to provide useful data for the decision making and medical service marketing by exploring the problems generated by the cognition difference for the medical service between inpatients and outpatients, by responding for the problems and by examining the relationship between the satisfaction with the medical service and revisiting. To achieve the object of this study, literature research and empirical analysis were used. I establish the research model based on the existing service marketing and some hypotheses were chosen for the empirical analysis. As a result of empirical analysis for the five hypotheses, two hypotheses were chosen. First, there was cognition difference about accessibility and convenience between inpatient and outpatient. I guess that the satisfaction degree of inpatient is higher than the outpatient because the inpatient has the reliability for the hospital and determines the hospitalization or emergent coming to hospital. Second, the fifth hypothesis, "the satisfaction of patient will influence the revisiting." was chosen. The hypothesis is not only coincident with existing scholars and studies but also it provides the meaningful points for medical service marketing. The result shows that the parties concerned with hospital management should endeavor for the patient satisfaction in medical service, and that hospital management should be medical consumer centered. To measure the quality of medical service, the cognition differences for accessibility, convenience, physical environment, and human service were evaluated and the result shows that the cognition difference for the accessibility and convenience was outstanding. The analysis shows that there was cognition difference in the four categories among six subcategories in the human service -- the attitude of medical technologist, the attitude of doctor, the length of time for doctor's diagnosis for the patient and doctor's explanation. Therefore, I think that further study is required for the cause analysis for service categories which have cognition difference between inpatient and outpatient. I think the result will be very useful. Through this study, the relationship between patient satisfaction with the medical service and revisiting was verified. And it suggests that, to face the changing medical environment actively and to improve the quality of medical service, marketing strategy should be focused not on medical service providers but on medical service consumers and that the further studies for the medical consumer should be continued.