Comparative Analysis of Health Care Service Quality between Public & Private Sector Hospitals in Odisha: An Optimization Model Based Approach

Abstract

Background: Healthcare services are the backbone of any civilized society as it helps in building and maintaining a sizable and healthy human resource that can contribute towards the growth of a nation. In a developing country like India, the healthcare services has taken a giant leap towards development in the recent decades as both government and private sectors have joined together to provide holistic healthcare services to the general public. But, as the healthcare sector is highly personalized in nature, it majorly depends upon the service quality to provide commendable offerings to the people. With this in background and as portion of a greater doctoral education, we have tried to assess the quality of services offered by various private and public sector medical college hospitals in the state of Odisha, India.           

Objectives: This basic aim of the study is to make comparison between quality of services offered through the private and public sector tertiary care hospitals in order to assess the ground realities and to figure out the deficiencies so that corrective measures can be recommended. Another objective is to take the help of optimization model in order to shortlist the hospitals amongst the private & public entities that can provide better quality services while minimizing the costs.

Methods: The study was conducted with a total 436 nos. of respondents visiting various public and private teaching hospitals in the state of Odisha in India. While recording their responses, we have used the famous SERVQUAL scale with a seven point likert scale. An optimization model has been introduced to minimize the cost when a patient selects the hospital for treatment.

Findings: The people visiting the private sector entities were comparatively more satisfied with the service offerings than the respondents visiting the public sector hospitals. The optimization technique used in the study also yielded results in the same line, where it was found that the patients will prefer the private hospitals with better quality of services and comparatively minimal costs. Though, a good percentage of people were found to be satisfied with the quality of services offered but still there exist many areas of improvements which are listed in the article as well as some reformative suggestions are discussed which if implemented properly can go a long way in making the whole process more fruitful.