What drives patient satisfaction: a rough set approach

Patient satisfaction survey has been widely adopted by healthcare providers to gauge their service quality and initiate process improvement actions. Usually, summary statistics from the survey results such as means, percentile ranks, and correlation coefficients are analysed for operational decisions. This paper presents a novel approach, using rough set theory, to analyse patient satisfaction survey data collected from a medium-sized community hospital in USA. The advantages of this approach lie in its ability to process data with vagueness and uncertainty, data reduction capability, and strong interpretation ability of decision rules. In this paper, a set of useful managerial rules were derived, based on which the hospital obtained insightful information on how to improve its service quality.