Developing a Hospital Choice Decision-Making scale; the providers' point of view

The increase in Taiwan's GDP per capita and the implementation of the National Health Insurance (NHI) not only have improved healthcare accessibility, but also reformed Taiwan's medical environment. Hospitals now compete by expanding in scale, thereby leading to even more intense competition, and resulting in a sustainable operating business model via healthcare marketing. Previous literature on the hospital decision-making process mostly focused on service quality, satisfaction, and loyalty, but was also limited to the scale of marketing segmentation. This study aims to develop a pilot Hospital Choice Decision-Making Style (HCDMS) scale from the providers' viewpoint. Based on the literature of both marketing and health care quality scale development, this pilot HCDMS is adopted from the Consumer Style Inventory (CSI) of Sproles and Kendall (1986). Since both convergent and discriminant validities are above the accepted levels, the proposed pilot HCDMS scale is proven to be a feasible instrument for hospital choice research.