Simulation and modelling application to understand patient satisfaction

Many hospitals are facing the difficulty of service management. This has major impact on meeting patient's expectations. Patient's satisfaction is gaining importance in health care services because service providers have to meet patient's expectations and win their confidence in order to stay in the business. This is no longer an advantage but has become an absolute necessity. Hospital Service Providers (HSP) have to overcome major challenges such as lack of provision of good quality services, lack of ability to cope with increasing and varying patient's demands and expectations, lack of flexibility in providing services and coping with recent mergers and takeovers of small and medium size HSP's. Failure to cope with these problems results in poor patient satisfaction. If the above reasons are particularly true there is a dramatic decrease in number of patients. The predominant reasons include mergers and takeovers. In this paper I address various issues surrounding the HSP industry and how these issues can be better understood and exercised using simulation methods. The paper presents the first step towards the application of modeling and simulation to understand patient satisfaction patterns for HSP's. I propose a simple simulation study framework called SIMPTS framework (Integrative simulative framework to understand Patient satisfaction patterns for HSP's) that can be used by large to medium size HSP's to improve patient satisfaction patterns. This research will directly contribute to the service quality area and will also help to understand the theoretical heftiness of various service quality models used to assess patient satisfaction by applying simulation to model specific service scenarios. This will help service providers to make competitive marketing decisions, increase patient loyalty, and hence retention.