The Impact of Integrated Quality on Hospital Performance: An Abstract

Abstract

Health care organizations are facing significant marketing challenges as a result of the rise in patient consumerism (McColl-Kennedy et al. 2017), in addition to the ever-increasing transparency in health care (U.S. News and World Report 2015). The current health care industry has seen a shift from ‘fee for service’ to ‘fee for value’ (Schroeder and Frist 2013), necessitating a need to improve the quality of care, while also enhancing hospitals’ performance (Mandal and Mandal 2017). Firms like Consumer Reports, US News & World Report, and the Leapfrog Group have increased healthcare organizations’ marketing challenges by providing and communicating relevant information in a consumer-friendly way (Ranard 2016). For instance, a Hospital Safety Score is assigned to US-based hospitals by Leapfrog in the form of a letter grade (A-F). One consequence of these consumer-friendly measures is that consumers increasingly rely on them to make decisions about whether to see a specific healthcare professional or visit a hospital (Findlay 2016). With the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the federal government began pressuring healthcare organizations to improve patient outcomes. Since 2017, hospitals that do not demonstrate a certain level of proficiency in care quality are penalized up to 2% of Medicare reimbursements. As a result, hospitals have begun to increase the level of quality they deliver in order to enhance their performance. Marketing and Operations Management research in this area focuses mainly on three types of quality (i.e., conformance, experiential, and environmental) as if they were orthogonal (e.g., Boulding et al. 2011; Makarem and Al-Amin 2014; Marley et al. 2004). Conformance Quality (CQ) is defined as the technical quality of care provided by hospital staff (Marley et al. 2004), while Experiential Quality (EnQ) is related to patients’ perception of the interpersonal quality of care (Makarem and Al-Amin 2014). Environmental Quality (EvQ) reflects the number of “conditions that patients acquire while receiving treatment for another condition in an acute care health setting” (CMS 2015). This research examines the impact of hospitals’ Integrated Quality (IQ), which is defined in this research as the combination of CQ, ExQ, and EvQ. The goal of this study is to answer the following research question: How does a hospital’s IQ impact hospital performance, specifically in reducing readmission rate and enhancing patient experience?