Research on Grass-roots Clinics Customers’ Medical Factors in Metropolitan Areas of Northern Taiwan
Date Issued
2015
Date
2015
Author(s)
Chen, Ying-Chun
Abstract
Taiwan began to implement universal health insurance in 1995 and changed the medical territory chronically over the past 20 years. There are four main medical subjects: internal medicine, surgery, gynecology and pediatrics. Because of the unreasonable payment and high medical dispute, medical personnel have moved to low medical dispute departments or left the hospital to enter the relatively simple grass-roots clinics. The number of grass-roots clinics has increased big. It has an increase of nearly 20 percent in the last ten years. It is amazing that it has surpassed the amount of convenience stores in Taiwan, which has turned clinics into battlefields for the Red Sea competition. Therefore, it is the research focus of this study to learn how to maintain the advantages of clinics and emerge as leaders in this intense competition. In tradition, the field of medical practice is authoritative in which doctors have noble status and customers have high compliance. With the improving education standards and the changing medical ecosystem, the medical industry has gradually transformed into service industry. Customer needs and preferences, service quality improvement, customer satisfaction and loyalty all need to be considered, as these can impact the operating performance of the industry. This study will explore customer needs in two different directions, one is the factors for consideration for first-visit patient while the other is the factors for consideration for the subsequent-visit patient, and further analyzing the satisfaction and loyalty of patients after visit. We take the patients from a clinic in metropolitan area of Northern Taiwan as a population and conduct survey. To make the research results unbiased, we use stratified random sampling and take the average number of visits based on different medical practice fields, different doctors'' working hours and the time that patients going to and getting off from work. Then, we design a questionnaire and start conducting survey after discussion, analysis and correction of validity. There are 56.9% of valid questionnaire results which are put through descriptive statistics, cross and cluster analysis. The study finds that the convenience in transportation is an important factor for selecting clinics no matter if it''s for the first-visit or subsequent-visit. Therefore, the selection of clinic’s location should consider first the population distribution, focusing on marketplace and community with crowds and finding a center point with a radius of 500 meters, and that will be an ideal location. The subsequent measures in maintaining existing customers’ reflux and finding new customers will rely on exploring the reasons for visit for the returning customers and the building loyalty. The subsequent-visit patients consider the characteristics of doctors (trusting their expertise) the most important factor, followed by the medical service quality. Therefore, doctors need to improve their professional field, constantly learning to care for patients. As for the service quality of clinics, customers are more concerned about the staff techniques (reliability), staff friendliness (caring), clean and comfortable environment (tangibility) and smooth treatment process (reliability). Customer loyalty, in addition to affecting the back-off rate, can be a good publicity to form the reputation of the clinic and bring in new customers. The results of the study show that, the best way to stabilize a customer source is to strengthen customer adhesion within a radius of 500 meters of clinics. The loyalty for pediatrics is higher than that for otolaryngology, showing that the preventive care from infant stage to preschool, the diagnosis and treatment during school age and long-term emotional foundation are the cornerstones of loyalty, so that the supply of vaccine may be an important factor in improving loyalty. In addition, we find that from the cluster analysis, the three medical service quality of enhancing doctors'' professional capacity, medical workers’ techniques and abilities and the smoothness of visit process can also improve the customer loyalty. In conclusion, for the basic clinics located in Northern Taiwan''s highly competitive metropolitan area, the selection of location can be an important factor deciding success or failure at the beginning. Attracting new customers, retaining old customers and building loyalty are the important considerations for clinics to maintaining operation. The keys are still the professional capacity of doctors and the excellent medical service quality, both the principles in managing clinics. In addition to this conclusion, we find more room for improvement for this study because the survey-takers are the patients so the questionnaire design should be further simplified for easier completion. Furthermore, loyalty needs to be tracked based on age variable to separately define the visit frequency because the needs for clinic visit are different for different ages. Also, the number of samples in this study may be too few that the more precise credibility can be achieved by expanding the scale of research to different clinics or even hospitals, obtaining more research data.
Subjects
first and subsequent visit
transportation convenience
physicians’ professional abilities
quality of medical service
loyalty
Type
thesis
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