Journal of Healthcare Management - January/February 2014 - (Page 34)

Journal of H ealt H care M anage Ment 59:1 J anuary /f ebruary 2014 comments about products and services they have purchased (Decker & Trusov, 2010; Hansen, Kreiter, Rosenbaum, Whitaker, & Arpey, 2003; Hogarth & Hilgert, 2004; Santuzzi, Brodnick, RinehartThompson, & Klatt, 2009; Schweidel, Moe, & Boudreaux, 2012; Siegrist, 2011; Tranter, Gregoire, Fullam, & Lafferty, 2009). Generally, people who give favorable ratings say positive things, and vice versa, though evidence indicates that consumers with very positive or very negative attitudes toward a product or service are more likely to post comments online than are those whose ratings fall in the middle of the scale (Dellarocas & Narayan, 2006). In offline environments, Anderson (1998) found that consumers with the most negative opinions of a brand were more likely to engage in negative word of mouth. These findings suggest that consumers add anecdotal comments to explain their reasons for giving a particular rating to a product or service they experienced, and this practice has become more common as online product review sites and satisfaction surveys have proliferated. Decker and Trusov (2010) further suggest that quantitative ratings serve as numerical representations of words and phrases consumers use in qualitative evaluations, implying that structured analyses of textual data could supplant standard survey-based measures of consumer sentiment (Archak, Ghose, & Ipeirotis, 2011; Lee & Bradlow, 2011; Schweidel et al., 2012). However, if patients' volunteered comments on the HCAHPS survey merely correlate with their quantitative ratings, they add little to our understanding of patient satisfaction or experience, other than helping to explain higher or lower numerical scores. Some researchers have found that ordinary quantitative measures in satisfaction surveys do not fully capture the customer's experience (Archak et al., 2011; Drain & Clark, 2004; Qu, Zhang, & Li, 2008) because the tools used to assess patients' experience lack the precision of those that measure providers' production and delivery of the service (Golder, Mitra, & Moorman, 2012). Similarly, the rating categories presented in the HCAHPS questionnaire items may not be sufficient to capture the patient's experience, especially if the stay involved multiple departments (e.g., emergency department and medical/surgical floor), several employees (e.g., day nurse and night nurse), or longer stays that necessitated complex treatment and interactions with many individuals at the hospital. For example, one respondent in our study checked two answers to HCAHPS Question 2 (During this hospital stay, how often did nurses listen carefully to you?) and wrote the following explanation: Day- Never; Night- Always The HCAHPS scoring protocol calls for this patient's response to be discarded and coded as missing data because the patient gave two answers to the same question (CMS, 2012). However, the patient's response is genuine and offers an important insight, illustrating what Pavlou and Dimoka (2006, 398) term fine-grained information, which cannot be captured by numerical ratings, as the patient intended to give credit to the 34

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Journal of Healthcare Management - January/February 2014

Journal of Healthcare Management - January/February 2014
Contents
Interview With Kenneth R. White, PhD, FACHE, Associate Dean for Strategic Partnerships and Innovation and the University of Virginia Medical Center Professor of Nursing, University of Virginia School of Nursing
Team-Based Care at Mayo Clinic: A Model for ACOs
The Management Springboard: Eight Ways to Launch Your Career as a Healthcare Leader
The Role of a Public–Private Partnership: Translating Science to Improve Cancer Care in the Community Donna M. O’Brien and Arnold D. Kaluzny
The Value of Patients’ Handwritten Comments on HCAHPS Surveys John W. Huppertz and Robert Smith
Can Inbound and Domestic Medical Tourism Improve Your Bottom Line? Identifying the Potential of a U.S. Tourism Market
Success Factors for Strategic Change Initiatives: A Qualitative Study of Healthcare Administrators’ Perspectives

Journal of Healthcare Management - January/February 2014