Dissonância entre a expectativa e percepção do consumidor de serviços de saúde: haveria relação com a incidência de heurísticas comportamentais?

Abstract

The perceived quality in public healthcare services is a crucial factor for user satisfaction and trust, directly impacting the use and evaluation of these services. However, cognitive factors such as behavioral heuristics can significantly influence this perception, creating dissonance between users' expectations and their actual experiences. This study aimed to investigate the relationship between behavioral heuristics and the dissonance between expectation and perceived quality among users of public healthcare services. The SERVQUAL tool was used to explore this relationship, applying questionnaires that gathered data on users' expectations and perceptions regarding the quality of public healthcare services. The data collection instrument was adapted to consider potential conflicts between users' expectations and their perceptions in consuming these services, integrating specific scenarios and behavioral heuristics. The results showed a frequent misalignment between users' expectations and perceptions, highlighting the influence of heuristics in quality judgments. This study offers significant contributions to quality management in public healthcare services by incorporating aspects of behavioral sciences into the evaluation of user satisfaction. As a limitation, the research was conducted with a sample restricted to a single location, which may limit the generalizability of the findings. For future studies, it is recommended to expand the sample to other regions and contexts and to explore additional variables that may impact quality perception, such as previous experience and users' educational level.