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.