1. Main Findings
We estimate our primary empirical model to see the impact of resources
on the probability of having better hospital performance. The estimation
results are provided in Table 3. The first two columns show the results
for the model using the overall hospital quality of care as the
dependent variable. Given beta coefficients and odd ratios on each
variable, patient engagement is positively associated with hospitals’
overall quality of care. Hospitals that have established PFAC have
30.9% greater odds of having better quality. In addition to patient
engagement, other resources have statistically significant impacts on
hospital quality. Although financial resources would not play an
important role, hospitals with more physical resources perform better in
quality care. Human resources would also be critical to increasing the
quality. Having one more physician per bed will give the hospital 47.2%
greater odds of having a higher score on the quality of care. Adding one
more nurse per bed will significantly improve the quality by having
33.4% greater odds. On the contrary, a hospital with a higher minority
population share in their community would be more likely to have a lower
quality score. In sum, we found that physical, human, social, and
institutional resources would be critical predictors of overall hospital
quality of care, and patient engagement would be a pivotal resource to
increase the quality of care.
The columns (3) and (4) in Table 3 show the estimation results for
predicting patient satisfaction. The results indicate that resource
inputs are also critical to improving patient satisfaction. Hospitals
with patient engagement have 49.4% greater odds of better patient
satisfaction than those without patient input. Physical resources are
also a critical factor in increasing the hospital’s performance, and the
impact of having a greater minority population share is also
statistically significant. Unlike the results for hospital quality,
however, only the number of physicians and dentists per bed is found to
be a significant predictor of patient satisfaction. Overall, we found
similar empirical findings for both performance measures, confirming all
the hypotheses suggested in the previous section. The physical and
financial resources results support H1-1 and H1-2, which are about their
role in improving the quality of care and patient satisfaction. Findings
on the significance of human resources on hospital performance confirm
H2-1 and H2-2. Also, the findings about the minority population in the
community support H3-1 and H3-2. One of the key findings of this study
is that patient engagement is an essential resource for hospitals. We
found that having PFAC would give a hospital a better chance of
providing quality care and increase patient satisfaction, confirming our
last two hypotheses, H4-1 and H4-2.