This study is aimed to better understand how and why people choose dental school faculty as their oral healthcare provider. Increasing financial constrains in the U.S. dental schools has led dental schools to find an alternative funding sources and revenues from dental school faculty practice can be one of them. To effectively promote faculty practice, it is necessary to understand how and why people choose dental school faculty as their oral care provider. In addition, it is important to differentiate characteristics of comprehensive care patients and limited care patients since dental school faculty practices have a higher proportion of specialists. A survey of 1150 dental school faculty practice patients who recently chose their dentist was conducted and 221 responded. Information sources highly used and rated included other dentist, friends, family, clinic website, the Internet, and the insurance directory. Dentist related attributes that were perceived important included quality of care, professional competence of dentist, and explanation of treatment/you participate in the treatment decision. Dental practice related attributes that were perceived important included ability to get appointments at convenient times, reasonable waiting time to get appointments, and attitude/helpfulness of staff. Among the respondents, 121 pursued a comprehensive care and 93 pursued a limited care. The two groups differed in terms of demographics, other characteristics, and dentist selection. The comprehensive care patients were younger, highly educated, related to healthcare related profession, and to have private dental insurance (p<0.001). The comprehensive care patients were more likely to use and highly rate information sources such as clinic website, the Internet, and the insurance directory (p<0.001). They put more value on attributes such as the dentist is in my insurance network and convenient physical location (p<0.001). This study has shown that traditionally popular (family, friends) and newly emerging information sources (the Internet, clinic website, and insurance directory) were used and perceived important by dental school faculty practice patients. A dental school or dentist can use this study's findings to promote their practice to select appropriate communication channels and focus on attributes that dental consumers value the most. It is also important to apply different strategies to different consumer groups.

<p>The dissertation is consisted of two essays on Affordable Care Act Marketplace plan pricing. These two essays are the two chapters of the dissertation respectively.  </p> <p>First essay studies the effect of Medicaid expansion on ACA Marketplace plan premium. The Affordable Care Act (ACA) aims to mitigate Americans’ uninsured crisis by expanding Medicaid and establishing the ACA Marketplace. The Medicaid expansion has a profound impact on Marketplace plan premiums. On the one hand, it lowers the premiums because the expansion drives out the people with lower income from Marketplace plans, resulting in a pool with a lower risk score for these plans. On the other hand, the Medicaid expansion may shrink the pool size of Marketplace plans, resulting in a riskier pool and a higher Marketplace plan premium. Integrating data from multiple sources, we study how these two competing effects vary across markets with different demographics. We find that the premium-reduction effect is less pronounced in more wealthy markets, while the premium-increase effect is less pronounced in more populous markets. We further find that the Medicaid expansion overall decreased the Marketplace premiums, with more reduction for Silver plans than Bronze plans. We also explore how the Medicaid expansion can lower Marketplace premiums indirectly through the change of the market structure. We finally show the heterogeneity of the net impact of the Medicaid expansion on Marketplace premiums across markets. Our results offer important policy and managerial implications.</p> <p>The second essay explores the effect of insurer competition on marketplace plan premiums. ACA Marketplace is a new market opportunity for insurers that grant them access to a new group of customers who were not insured before. Previous studies utilize ACA marketplace data and find that additional insurers on the market are associated with a premium decrease in Marketplaces for a benchmark plan. However, the impact of the insurer entry on the premium is not the same for all plans. Using data from 2014 to 2017, we empirically examine the effect of insurer entry on the premium on Marketplace. Our study first confirms the finding that the premium of the second-lowest Silver plans decreases in the number of insurers. We further find evidence of different price trends across plans of different quality levels with additional insurers on the market. When more insurers are on the market, the premium increases for higher-end plans and decreases for lower-end plans. Our analysis shows that intensified competition may exaggerate price discrimination in certain segments while alleviate price discrimination in other markets. The results offer important managerial implications. </p>

In current market conditions, even a healthcare facility has to stack up against competition. An effective quality control of the health care provided, and an excellent perception of customers' needs are crucial, in order to achieve this objective. Customer satisfaction represents important feedback from the clients. Taking this into account, any healthcare facility should measure and evaluate satisfaction of the customers, having as an objective, a permanent improvement of the services provided. The aim of this thesis is to measure healthcare quality in a healthcare laboratory through evaluation of a questionnaire survey on patient satisfaction. The thesis consists of a theoretical and an empirical part. The theoretical part describes quality control systems in healthcare laboratories, defines the concepts of product, marketing and marketing mix "C". It also focuses on the patient, as a priority customer of the healthcare system, and defines the main reasons for examining their satisfaction. The empirical part gives firstly, an overview of activities of a particular healthcare laboratory. Subsequently, it describes the research performed and interprets the data received. There are 69.7 % of patients satisfied with the provided laboratory services. The satisfaction is determined by their age and by...