View article

While the ultimate goal of health care is to maintain or improve the health status, features of care, including the quality of hotel services, are important to enhance the quality of health care services. Due to the limited resources of the health system, it is important to recognize the strengths and weaknesses of health service providers for policy-making and allocating resources in line with customers’ expectations.

The current study aimed at ranking the dimensions of hospital hoteling services from patients’ perspectives using the importance-performance analysis (IPA) method in Tehran, Iran.

In this cross-sectional study, 440 patients were enrolled through multi-stage random sampling. The data collection tool was a questionnaire consisting of 44 items in six dimensions. Its internal reliability was determined based on Cronbach’s alpha coefficient (α = 0.97). The IPA method was used to prioritize the dimensions. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and the paired t-test at a significance level of < 0.05.

In all aspects of hoteling, there was a significant difference between the performance of hospitals and the expectations of patients. The highest and lowest gaps between performance and expectation were related to the economic-financial and performance-process factors, respectively (P < 0.05). Based on the IPA matrix, the