Assessing Customer Satisfaction to Support Future Improvement Strategies of Healthcare Systems: Evidences from Russia and Romania

Abstract

The analyses of current healthcare systems in Russia and Romania made by different scholars in the specialty literature highlight a below-medium health quality index worldwide, which is especially low when compared to leading EU countries. The prevailing need to address health features with quantitative customer research has prompted this paper to focus on the challenges of the healthcare systems in two countries from the customer’s perspective. The main goal of the research is to capture the main problems of the analyzed healthcare systems which require certain improvements, changes, and innovations, and to find proper strategies for their future development from a marketing approach. The attitudes of 410 people from Russia and Romania have been collected using an electronic survey, based on a questionnaire that contained some items concerning the marketing mix in the public and private clinics from the two analyzed countries. These items have been evaluated by respondents from both the importance and satisfaction perspectives, and the Importance–Satisfaction (IS) matrix was used to discover marketing strategies that are the best fit for each component of the marketing mix in the healthcare clinics. The outcomes of this study highlight the need to focus efforts mainly on improving the quality of the services in both countries, with some peculiarities for the public and private sectors. It was also revealed that both countries need massive improvements in their public clinic sectors.