What Patients Really Value in Physicians and What They Take for Granted: An Analysis of Large-Scale Data from a Physician-Rating Website

Background: Customer-oriented health-care management and patient satisfaction have become important for physicians to attract patients in an increasingly competitive environment. Satisfaction influences patients’ choice of the physician and leads to higher patient retention and higher willingness to engage in positive word-of-mouth. In addition, higher satisfaction has positive effects on patients’ willingness to follow advice given by the physician. In recent years, physician-rating websites (PRW) have emerged in the health-care sector and are increasingly used by patients. Patients’ usage includes either posting an evaluation to provide feedback to others about the own experience with a physician or reading evaluations of other patients prior to choosing a physician. The emergence of PRW, however, offers new avenues to analyze patient satisfaction and its key drivers. PRW data enable both satisfaction analyses and implications on the level of the individual physician as well as satisfaction analyses and implications on an overall level. Objective: This research identifies linear and nonlinear effects of patients’ perceived quality of physician appointment service attributes on overall evaluation measures. Methods: It is based on large-scale survey data from a German physician-rating website including 84,680 ratings of 7,038 physicians on 24 service attributes and four overall evaluation measures. Multiplicative regression models are estimated with perceived attribute quality as explanatory variables and overall evaluation measures as dependent variables. Depending on the slope (concave, linear or convex), service attributes are classified into three categories: attributes with diminishing, constant, or increasing returns to overall evaluation. Results: The proposed approach reveals new insights about what patients value when visiting physicians and what they take for granted. Improvements in the physician’s pleasantness and friendliness have increasing returns to overall evaluation (beta=1.26). The practices’ cleanliness (beta=1.05) as well as the communication behavior of a physician during the encounter (beta between 0.97 and 1.03) have constant returns. Indiscretion in the waiting rooms, extended waiting times, a lack of modernity of the medical equipment (beta between 0.46 and 0.59) by contrast, have the most pronounced diminishing returns to overall evaluation. Conclusions: The categorization of the service attributes supports physicians in identifying potential for improvements and prioritizing resource allocation. Thus, the study contributes to patient-centered health-care management and furthermore promotes the utility of physician-rating websites through large-scale data analysis. In terms of methodology, service researchers can apply the multiplicative regression approach in multiattribute models to identify diminishing, constant, or increasing returns in various settings.