Do patients value a hospital’s innovativeness reputation? A multi-method approach to assess the relative importance of innovativeness reputation in patients’ hospital choice

Abstract

Innovations in health care are costly and risky, but they also provide the opportunity for hospitals to increase quality of care, to distinguish themselves from competitors and to attract patients. While numerous hospitals strive to increase their innovativeness by adopting a costly innovation leader strategy, the question of whether this actually influences the patient's choice remains unanswered. To understand the role of innovativeness from the patient perspective, this study conceptualizes the construct of innovativeness reputation of hospitals and determines its relevance in patients' hospital choice decisions. In the pretest, we identified six dimensions of innovativeness reputation such as progressive work procedures and value added services. We then used three different quantitative multi-criteria decision-making methods to evaluate the relative importance of innovativeness reputation in patient choice. We collected data from 355 former German patients who had undergone elective non-emergency surgery. Overall, innovativeness reputation accounts for 11.6%-16.8% of the patient decision. Innovativeness reputation has a moderate influence on hospital choice and should be taken into account by managers. Since technical innovations are costly, hospitals should use other means to enhance their innovative image. Strategies such as emphasizing value added services can enable hospitals to increase their innovativeness reputation efficiently.

Employee involvement in innovation activities in hospitals: How perception matters

“…Thus, next to policy initiatives and reforms, innovation and a reputation for being innovative become more important for hospitals to cope with future challenges. 2 It is widely accepted that employees are a very important group for innovation and value co-creation in a multi-stakeholder service environment. [3][4][5] Thus, the topic of employee involvement in innovation (EII) has been extensively studied in the literature, 6,7 and practices to foster innovative behavior amongst employees along the innovation process have been adopted across different organizations.…”

“…Thus, next to policy initiatives and reforms, innovation and a reputation for being innovative become more important for hospitals to cope with future challenges. 2…”