Previously submitted to: Journal of Medical Internet Research (no longer under consideration since Aug 20, 2020)
Date Submitted: Jul 25, 2020
Warning: This is an author submission that is not peer-reviewed or edited. Preprints - unless they show as "accepted" - should not be relied on to guide clinical practice or health-related behavior and should not be reported in news media as established information.
Effect of Psychology Distance in Healthcare Supply Chain on Patient Satisfaction: Randomized Controlled Trial
ABSTRACT
Background:
While most of the prior literature focused on how to improve patient satisfaction from an operational perspective, we explore how healthcare supply chain communications benefit patient satisfaction by adopting a stakeholder’s perspective. Moreover, we examine and further confirm the effect of supply chain transparency in a unique healthcare context.
Objective:
The objective of this research is to examine the impact of the healthcare supply chain transparency on patient satisfaction. Anchoring on the theory of psychology distance, we examine how spatial distance (manufacturing location of the medicine) and temporal distance (time frame of physician follow-up after the visits) of the healthcare supply chain influence the patient’s perceptions and satisfaction.
Methods:
We utilize a 2 × 2 mixed design experiment by varying spatial distance and temporal distance of the healthcare supply chain, respectively. A total of 206 participants were recruited from the Amazon M-Turk platform.
Results:
Results indicate that both the spatial distance and the temporal distance significantly affect patients’ satisfaction.
Conclusions:
The spatial distance of the healthcare supply chain negatively affects patients’ satisfaction. Nevertheless, we find that the temporal distance can mitigate such negative effects: when the physicians follow up with the patient within a short time frame (one week), patients tend to generate higher satisfaction towards the physician than if the follow up is conducted after three months.
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Copyright
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