Patient perceptions of service quality. Combining the dimensions.

Empirically investigates, using a conjoint methodology, the importance weights given to the attributes of quality for acute care hospital services. The study shows that consumers evaluated the technical dimensions of nursing care, physician care, and outcome as more important than the accommodation functions of hospital care, and there are significant interactions among the technical dimensions. Both sets of dimensions were important and significant, but technical quality evaluations were not influenced by the perceived quality level of the affective attributes. The relative importance of these attributes were quite stable among various subgroups of past patients.