What factors are important in formulating a community hospital's reputation?

Abstract

There is a growing body of literature on the importance of corporate reputation and reputation management, but scant research that looks at reputation in the context of a community hospital. Most hospital administrators agree that reputation is important and suggest that it has an impact on operations, but the nature of hospital reputation and how it is formed is not well understood. This study includes a comprehensive literature review, in-depth interviews with six Ontario hospital CEOs, two patient/community member focus groups and an on-line survey with patients and community members. The results of this study strongly suggest that most common models of corporate reputation are not directly applicable to hospitals. Factors such as leadership, innovation and financial performance that appear in most corporate reputation models and measurement tools do not appear to be a factor when patients and community members formulate a hospital’s reputation. Personal experience and word of mouth are used to evaluate a hospital on desired outcomes, and this research suggested that those outcomes are strongly related to emotional appeal (feeling cared about) as opposed to clinical outcomes or results. A new model of reputation specifically for hospitals is proposed, but more research is required to better understand the drivers of hospital reputation and to create a more accurate model that can be widely adopted by the industry.