Cognitive predictors of satisfaction with hospital inpatient service encounters among the elderly: a matter of trust.

Given the burgeoning growth of the elderly population, ensuring the satisfaction of senior consumers of health services is worthy of heightened attention by healthcare administrators both on economic and social grounds. By examining inpatient satisfaction among the elderly, we have focused our attention on an important and understudied segment of health consumers within a dominant service delivery context. Moreover, we have supplemented traditional hospital service satisfaction indicators by including a variety of rarely used psychological variables as cognitive predictors of service assessments.

Cultural affiliation and the importance of health care attributes. Marketers can develop segmentation strategies for targeted patient groups.

Culturally based values are known to influence consumer purchase decisions, but little is known about how those values affect health care choices. To rectify that situation and provide health care marketers with a framework for developing culturally based segmentation strategies, the authors undertook an exploratory research project in which Hispanic-, African-, and Anglo-Americans were asked to rate the importance of 16 different health care attributes. Those attributes can be grouped under five categories: quality of physician, quality of nurses and other medical staff, economic issues, access to health care, and nonmedically related experiential aspects.

The role of psychographic characteristics as determinants of complaint behavior by elderly consumers of physician health care services.

The authors investigate the influence of various psychographic characteristics in distinguishing between those elderly patients who complain about dissatisfying experiences with health care providers and those who do not. Discriminant analysis results suggest that patients who are low in trust in their physicians and who are younger in terms of cognitive age are more likely to complain than are patients who are high in trust and older in terms of cognitive age. In light of these findings, the authors propose a number of managerially-relevant courses of action for health care providers.