Leader's Perceptions of TRICARE: A Study of McDonald Army Community Hospital's Marketing Effectiveness
Abstract
This project studied the effectiveness of McDonald Army Community Hospital's marketing efforts. Levels of satisfaction and depth of knowledge about TRICARE were examined among 42 Army, active-duty leaders utilizing a mailed survey. The chain of command is often the first source of information that a soldier seeks. If a leader is knowledgeable about TRICARE, the health care options available to beneficiaries, and convinced that the program is worth while, then one of the most effective means of advertisement is generated; word-of-mouth recommendation from established users to new users. Levels of satisfaction dealing with cost, quality, and access to health care were reported utilizing a five point Likert-type scale. Knowledge base was established by asking the respondents six, true/false pertaining to regional TRICARE marketing literature. A score was calculated based on the number of correct answers in the survey knowledge section. The purpose of the study was to determine if there was a relationship between a leader's positive endorsement of TRICARE Prime and any of the 11 independent variables. Bivariate correlation was used to create a correlation matrix with SPSS 6.1 Statistical Software Package. The significance level (alpha) was set at .05 and independent variables of access, comfort, cost, quality, rank, and unit were found to have significant linear relationships to the dependent variable endorsement. The common variance for each variable pair, summarized by the coefficient of determination, revealed the percentage of variation in endorsement explained by the independent variable. The recommendation to the Hospital Commander was to focus marketing efforts on improving levels of satisfaction dealing with cost, quality, and access. Efforts should be filtered down to lower ranking leaders and smaller units. Each of these recommendations should have a positive effect on endorsement of TRICARE Prime.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 01, 1997
- Accession Number
- ADA372231
Entities
People
- Jeffrey R. Quinn
Organizations
- Academy of Health Sciences