Healthcare Resort: An Integrated Approach to Re-model Healthcare Services

With the increasing popularity of medical tourism practices, the healthcare industry, as one of the key service providers and stakeholders, is facing both challenges and opportunities. Healthcare, like hospitality, is an experience and credence service. Services with predominantly credence attributes are typically the case for highly specialized services or services that only occur once a twice in a lifetime, such as medical diagnoses and hospitalization. Credence services are the most difficult to verify because they often lack physical evidence of the service process. To evaluate the credence qualities of the service, inferences will be made based on experience-based portion of the total service delivery process. One of the emerging trends in the industry is to introduce the concept of hospitality into hospitals. For example, Severt et al. (2008) explore an organization-wide philosophy of hospitality (i.e., hospitality centric philosophy) in a hospital setting. It is not new for the healthcare industry to learn from other industries including the hotel and entertainment industries (Cheung-Larivee 2011a; Kaissi 2012; Lee 2004). Disney has also been marketing its services to hospitals even before the government demands an online patient satisfaction surveys. Florida Hospital’s children’s unit improved its patient satisfaction scores from the bottom 10 % of the country to the top 10 % 1 year after it hired Disney. The purpose of this study is to explore various ways to incorporate hospitality management practices and customer service into hospitals and opportunities that these proposed changes may bring to the healthcare industry in the U.S. This study focuses on, (1) market expansion, (2) integrated medical services, (3) quality measurement and creation of improved patient experience. Proposition 1: A hospitality enhanced healthcare facility will not only be able to serve the needs of local residents but also patients who live in other states or countries. Proposition 2: A hospitality service enhanced healthcare facility is composed of three major functions: core medical service (the core medical product that patients value the most when they make decisions regarding their well-being), support service (informational and environmental services), and hospitality service (service that focuses on enhancing the total experience for patients, which is a proposed new addition to the traditional healthcare service structure). This model proposes a transformation from customer relationship management (CRM) to patient relationship management (PRM). Proposition 3: A hospitality enhanced medical facility will enable patients to enjoy an improved experience at the facility. Besides clinical outcomes, patient experience is valued as a critical component to measurement of quality outcome. Patients’ satisfaction is believed to improve recovery rate, speed up healing process, provide healing power of mind, and increase patient compliance. In conclusion, our model illustrates how hospitals may expand their target market, generate more revenue, improve service quality, and build a strong loyalty program by creating hospitality enhanced healthcare facilities and implementing key customer service concept in the entertainment industry.