An investigation into social media use effect on patient’s satisfaction in private hospitals in Oman

Abstract

The research study on the topic “An investigation into social media use effect on patient’s satisfaction in private hospitals in Oman” is carried out to find out how can hospitals use social media to increase patient’s satisfaction in Oman. In the study positivism & interpretivism philosophy is used to analyse the social reality, deductive & inductive approach was used to test the hypothesis & to find out the significant relationship between the 2 variables using social media & patient satisfaction. Another hypothesis was testing to find out the significant relationship between age & 7 dependent variables related to benefits of using social media. In deductive approach, action based research strategy & survey strategy was adopted to obtain the required data through online survey. The research design descripto-explanatory study is used. In non-probabilistic sampling method snowball sampling technique was adopted with a sample size of 183 responses were taken into consideration to analyse the data. Crosstabulation, Chi-square, Anova & frequency distribution were the analysis used with the Cohen’s Kappa test, Pearson correlation P value, Post Hoc & Dunnett test done to analyse the data the interpret them. The results indicate that social media usage can have a positive & negative impact on patient’s satisfaction. Instagram & Facebook were the most popular social media platforms in Oman. Furthermore, all the dependent variables analysed were positively correlated in the analysis of benefits of social media usage. In addition to it the findings indicate that comments posted on hospitals social media page can effect patient’s decision making. Health care providers (HCP) in Oman should follow best practice by providing reliable information, stay updated, less response time, careful and professional behaviour, maintain confidentiality & privacy of patients which contributes to build a strong brand awareness among the public & to communicate with epatient both effectively and efficiently.