The rapid growth of Chinese Internet hospitals resulted in an urgent need for systematic service evaluation to better supervise and guide their development and application. However, most previous studies have focused on patients’ evaluation of Internet hospital service quality, and did not consider healthcare professionals as users of Internet hospital services. The aims of this study are to evaluate the service quality of Internet hospitals from the perspective of healthcare professionals by validating the Chinese version of Service Quality Questionnaire (SERVQUAL-C), and to assess the impact of service quality on healthcare professionals’ satisfaction with Internet hospitals. A cross-sectional survey was administered through face-to-face or online interviews from June to September 2022. Participants were 646 healthcare professionals (248 males, 398 females) employed at Chinese hospitals. Participants reported their attitude toward using Internet hospitals and rated their expectations and perceptions of the service quality of these hospitals using the translated Chinese version of the SERVQUAL. The SERVQUAL-C exhibited acceptable psychometric properties. Content validity was supported by expert evaluation from 50 experts in healthcare management, hospital informatics, and psychometrics, while structural validity was further supported by confirmatory factor analysis (χ² / df ≤ 4.798, CFI ≥ 0.959, TLI ≥ 0.952, RMSEA ≤ 0.085, SRMR ≤ 0.020). The overall reliability was satisfactory (Cronbach’s α > 0.980). Multiple linear regression suggested that age, hospital grade and the perceived service quality of Internet hospitals were significantly associated with healthcare professionals’ satisfaction with Internet hospitals. Furthermore, the association between perceived service quality and healthcare professionals’ satisfaction was conditional upon expected service quality (B = 0.198, P = .033), with the positive association only being significant for those who held high expectations of these hospitals. Finally, the association between perceived service quality and healthcare professionals’ satisfaction differed across medical departments (Bs > 1.049, Ps < 0.048), with internal medicine, pediatrics, medical technology, and surgery showing greater associations than the Internet hospital administration and Internet technology department (i.e., the reference group). The SERVQUAL-C has satisfactory internal consistency and acceptable content validity, and may serve as an evaluation tool to assess healthcare professionals’ perspectives of the service quality of Internet hospitals. Promoting service quality in Internet hospitals would help improve healthcare professionals’ satisfaction and create a better remote medical environment.
Han et al. (Sat,) studied this question.