Analysis of factors affecting people's hospital preferences in health economics: A field study

Among the institutions providing the same type of service, the organization making a difference against their competitors is preferred in today's conditions of increasing competition. In order to be preferred, institutions need to quickly understand the requests and needs of people requesting services and respond to their expectations. At this point, institutions strive to gain a competitive advantage by increasing the quality of their services and their perception of corporate image. Since the service area is human health, health institutions are obliged to pay more attention while providing services. In this research, firstly, explanations were made about the concepts of health, hospital preference, corporate image and service quality. After the literature review, in order to determine the factors affecting the hospital preference of individuals, data were collected by applying questionnaires to 510 people who received service from health institutions in Tekirdağ city center in the hospital environment and frequency analysis, reliability test, Mann-Whitney U and Kruskal Wallis Test, explanatory and confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation model analyzes were made and interpreted. The findings obtained from the research explained the effect of the service quality of the individuals on the hospital preference over the corporate image and the effect of the corporate image on the hospital preference over the service quality.