Ensuring patient satisfaction in medical groups.

Delivering satisfaction to patients has become increasingly important among professionals in the medical community. However, administrators in medical group practices charged with the task of nurturing customer satisfaction are often required to allocate their limited funds across an array of initiatives intended to ensure the delivery of the right amount and types of services to improve satisfaction among their customers. This requires the ability to locate areas that yield the greatest response per unit of investment. This paper shows that the impact of attribute performance on satisfaction is asymmetric. Positive attribute performance is shown to have a smaller impact on satisfaction than negative attribute performance. The paper also discusses how an understanding of this asymmetry will enable administrators to allocate their resources more wisely as they decide whether to maintain or increase attribute-level performance.