Title: What drives patient satisfaction: a rough set approach

Authors: Yuerong Chen; Shengyong Wang; Chien-Chung Chan; Tejas Gandhi

Addresses: AT&T, Group O, Inc., Milwaukee, WI 53208, USA ' Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of Akron, Akron, OH 44325, USA ' Department of Computer Science, University of Akron, Akron, OH 44325, USA ' Medical Center of Central Georgia, Macon, GA 31201, USA

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: service management; service quality; patient satisfaction; survey analysis; rough set theory; rule derivation; rough sets; community hospitals; USA; United States; healthcare management; healthcare services.

DOI: 10.1504/IJHTM.2014.067128

International Journal of Healthcare Technology and Management, 2014 Vol.14 No.4, pp.254 - 271

Accepted: 16 Apr 2014
Published online: 07 Feb 2015 *

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