Evaluating Serviceability of Healthcare Servicescapes: Service Design Perspective

For the last two decades, the healthcare industry has gone through changes in healthcare service deliveries. These changes are a response to: higher service expectations from patients, ever-advancing technology, greater access to health information through the internet and the digital media, and a holistic approach to health and well-being concerns (Francis, 2010). In this competitive healthcare market with growing patient consumerism, it is important for healthcare providers to understand what patients and families experience in their facilities, how they perceive healthcare service quality, and what impacts those perceptions in order to satisfy and exceed patients’ wants and needs. In 2001, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) established six aims for improving healthcare quality. They are to be: safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient, and equitable (IOM, 2001). Of all these aims, patient-centered healthcare has been a driving force for healthcare servicescape design. The healthcare industry has recognized the importance of servicescapes, or the physical environments of the organization, in shaping the service experience of its patients and families. They have drawn from the service provision of other industries such as restaurants and hotels to focus on customers as guests (Fottler, Ford, Roberts, & Ford, 2000). The concept of patient-centered care is also tied closely to that of service design: to develop service encounters that are useful, usable, and desirable from the client’s perspective (Moritz, 2005). Parasuraman, Zeithaml, and Berry (1988) suggested a measurement tool to assess consumer perceptions with service quality (called SERVQUAL), and it has been popularly used in marketing research ever since. The tool is composed of five dimensions of service quality that include tangibles, reliability, responsiveness, assurance, and empathy. This composition of dimensions for service quality measurement shows that tangibles such as physical environments and equipment are crucial for consumer perceptions, although the service itself is intangible. Servicescapes are also tangible service qualities from which consumers develop perceptions about the service provider and, thus, are important components of service design that the service provider needs to evaluate for impact on consumer satisfaction in regard to quality of service. Healthcare providers should also consider the impact that the physical environment can have on encouraging or discouraging certain behaviors and emotions (Carpman & Grant, 1993) and the positive effect they can have in the healing process (Fottler et al., 2000).