| Summary: | 碩士 === 正修科技大學 === 經營管理研究所 === 97 === Last July 1998, Taiwan’s dental clinics first tried implementing the “Global budget system” in replacement of the “Fee for service” system left dental clinics currently facing the saturated market with no choice but to introduce self-paid medical products and service such as dental implants, movable braces, orthodontic corrections, dentures and dental whitening. These self-paid products and services became the dental clinics’ main source of earnings which occupy around 58% of the total earnings, thus, this study will further explore “the adoption preference of self-paid medical products by patients.”
The purpose of this study is to explore the effect of the framework, process and outcome of the quality of health care service as well as the effect of product attributes such as brand, doctor’s word of mouth, price, dental clinics’ relative advantage and compatibility to the adoption intention of self-paid medical products and provide objective management implications and strategies to dental clinics. This study drew out samples from the patients of dental clinics certified by the ABC dental association to be specializing in “orthodontics” treatment and those clinics that received dental sanitary trainings in Kaoshiung. Total valid questionnaires were 430 copies, and this study made use of the SPSS statistical software to measure the reliability of the said questionnaires. Also, factor analysis was used to verify the consistency of the dimensions and finally, regression analysis was used to explore the effect of the eight dimensions mentioned in this study on the adoption intention of self-paid medical products.
Empirical test suggests that the quality of health care service and product attributes perceived by patients has a positive influence on the adoption intention of orthodontics treatment. Thus, aside from improving the quality of the overall medical treatment, clinics should focus more on the establishment of its brands and doctors’ word of mouth in order for the dental clinic to attain relative advantage and provide self-paid products and compatible and related information to patients as well as increase the adoption intention of self-paid medical products. Moreover, this study found that the factors influencing adoption intention comes in the following order: the relative advantage of the dental clinic, medical structure, doctors’ word of mouth, compatibility, dental clinics’ brands and treatment outcome; while patients doesn’t give much importance to the treatment process and price, this may be because the patients believe that most dental treatments consume little time compare to the common surgeries, and skills used for treatments aren’t complicated; Also, price is not considered, though patients might care about the price of the self-paid product, but since it involves one’s health and safety, most of the patients would tend to doubt the quality of lower priced products. Thus, in contrast to other variables, treatment process and low price doesn’t have much effect on the adoption intention of self-paid products by patients.
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