The role of service recovery in HMO satisfaction.

Complaint handling and service recovery by HMOs may be more efficient to implement and more determinant of customer satisfaction and retention than other approaches such as improving access to care. The current findings are consistent with research on recovery efforts in other industries. Complaint handling systems must achieve rapid and comprehensive identification and resolution of HMO member problems. Both cultural change and appropriate incentives to re-educate employees within HMO organizations are additional requisites to effective service recovery. The benefits to the HMO of expenditures on service recovery should be more immediate and sustainable than the benefits derived from other methods of increasing member satisfaction.

Identifying new patient prospects: efficacy of usage segmentation. For some health care services, usage-based segmentation schemes can be wasteful and ineffective.

Even though there is intuitive appeal in identifying the user profile for a given service and then targeting similar nonusers, this approach can be very misleading when marketing health care services with low market penetration. If usage segmentation is employed without checking other indicators of latent demand and perceived barriers to use, significant misallocation of marketing resources is likely to occur. Confidentiality and embarrassment can be significant barriers to use by segments that are excellent patient prospects. In this study of mental and behavioral care, females and non-whites were found to be more concerned with confidentiality than were members of the user group. Lack of awareness can be a much bigger impediment to adoption than negative attitudes. Health care marketers need to design communications that not only increase awareness and familiarity for services with low market penetration, but also address other issues of concern to highly receptive segments.

Decision to adopt new medical technology: a case study of thrombolytic therapy.

New medical technologies are adopted by practising physicians at varying rates. Thrombolytic therapy is an example of a technological advance that many physicians have seemed reluctant to employ. A random sample of board certified internists was surveyed by mail to study factors that influence decisions to use thrombolytic agents. Variables important in predicting use were identified by discriminant analysis. In general users and non-users had similar assumptions about the risks and benefits of this technology. Among the important predictor variables were a perception of having patients suitable for treatment, availability of the agents and self-rating of knowledge about this therapy. Among questions related to type of practice and education, only subspecialization and textbook reading were important discriminators. These results suggest that decisions to adopt new technologies do not follow simply from risk-benefit assessments.