Patient experience in community pharmacies from an experiential marketing perspective: structural equation model

Abstract

: The main objective of this study was to model patient experience (PX) in community pharmacies as experimental marketing parameters via structural equation modeling (SEM). Our findings show that peace of mind, trust, pharmacy, customer engagement, interaction quality with the pharmacist and personnel, and atmosphere or periphery experience quality is the important component for a patient to re-visit the same pharmacy. The patient's journey to the pharmacy starts before entering the pharmacy, continues at the pharmacy, and then leaves the pharmacy. It is important to understand the touchpoint of the patient journey at a community pharmacy and the needs of the patients as well as other health services. Overall, whether it is patient experience or customer experience, both focus on people and understanding their needs as a service sector will add value to service quality. The research was conducted on 414 volunteer patients given informed consent and answered 73 items in Istanbul province. The data obtained from the questionnaire forms were analyzed using the IBM SPSS Statistics 23 package program. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) was applied using IBM SPSS AMOS 23 package program in the analysis of trust, pharmacy customer engagement (PCE), word of mouth (WoM), pharmacist interaction quality, personnel interaction quality, periphery experience quality, peace-of-mind (POM), and autobiographical memory parameters. Since the assumption of normality was not provided, the relationships among these items were calculated using Spearman's correlation coefficient. The results were evaluated at the significance level of p <0.05. Finally, a structural equation model was conducted to specify PX items.