Importance of appointment systems for customer satisfaction and health care quality

By the fact that, feature of health care quality, assessment and evaluation of patient satisfaction has become crucial to the success of health care providers. The main point of measuring patient satisfaction is to be able to identify the main factors affecting satisfaction. Among these factors appointment system has great performance. The main purpose of designing effective and efficient appointment system about ambulatory treatment ve diagnosis health care services is reducing waiting periods for the patients and reducing doctors' leisure and overtime risk by regulating the patient flow within the clinics. At the same time, the appointment systems determine the number of days booked by the patients, in other words, the length of time they have to Access the health care. Objective: The main aim of the study is evaluating the quality of outpatient appointment systems by patients. Method: Target population of the study is patients of a tertiary helath care service – a university hospital in İzmir- who have outpatient treatment by using an appointment system. A survey based on the SERVQUAL analysis developed by Parasuraman, Zeithaml and Berry was used as data collection tool. In the analysis of the data, validity and reliability analyzes were made primaly by using the SPSS 21.00 program. Then descriptive statistics, T-Test, ANOVA test, Correlation and Regression analyzes were performed. Results: In an university hospital in İzmir, the effect of the satisfaction of 95 patients who applied using the patient's own policlinic appointment system (outpatients) was measured to the satisfaction of overall service quality. In the study, it was seen that the system which will be developed as an alternative to the existing appointment system would increase the satisfaction. In the study, it was also measured whether there was a significant difference between the perceived levels of appointment systems in terms of customer satisfaction and quality of health according to the demographic characteristics of the applicants. T-test and ANOVA tests showed that differences in gender, age, occupational choice, education and income status did not affect patient satisfaction. Conclusion: Since the satisfaction of the weighted appointment systems in the study was measured the general satisfaction effect, detailed analyzes were made for the sub-factors that make up the appointment systems. According to this, ,t was observed that the alternative e-appointment system satisfaction was the most effective factor affecting the overall service satisfaction.