Most health care providers probably wouldn't feel comfortable referring to their patients as "customers," but in many ways that's what they've become. Changes in the health care industry have forced providers to compete for business in a market whose consumers are making increasingly well-informed choices from the array of "products" available to them.

One outgrowth of this competition likely will be an increase in the number of hospitals and other health care organizations conducting research with their patients to gauge satisfaction levels and identify areas needing improvement.

An example is Bellevue Hospital, a privately-owned 40-bed facility in Schenectady, New York. The hospital, which sees about 2100 babies delivered each year, provides a variety of health care services for women, including obstetrics, gynecology, and outpatient clinical services. It draws its patients from 17 counties in and around the Tri-City area of Albany, Schenectady and Troy.

Bellevue is nearing the end of a yearlong ongoing patient satisfaction survey conducted by Fact Finders, Inc., an Albany, New York-based research company. Each quarter, 500 discharged patients are contacted by telephone two weeks after the end of their stay to take a three-minute survey on their impressions of the hospital's service.

Ellen Kerness, Bellevue's manager of marketing and public relations, says that the survey was commissioned despite the hospital's already strong reputation. "We'd always heard that the perception of Bellevue was that it was a wonderful place to go and that the care was excellent, from food services to nursing. But we wanted to see if what we were hearing through the grapevine was actually what was perceived by patients."

In each quarter of the survey the hospital has earned rave reviews from its patients in all service areas. For example, the nursing staff was rated extremely highly across the boa...