Private Hospitals in Jakarta and the Surrounding Area: From People’s Point of View

I remember in January 2024, I made a simple survey to get people’s opinions about what they like and dislike about their chosen hospital and other hospitals in general located in Jakarta and the surrounding area just for my own insight. After I decided to resign from working in a private hospital, I had a lot of time to even recognize the industry as a whole. It is different when you are inside the corporate and managing one department day-by-day than looking from outside, from a bird’s eye view, and seeing the whole picture.

Back in the days when I was still working, I was assigned to attend an invitation for a private hospital management meeting in Jakarta. It was in 2022; a small group discussion was held by the Ministry of Health to discuss Health Services Management, attended by managers of major private hospitals. This event was held over concerning data of what happened in 2019, before the pandemic.

It was a big blow for us, at that moment, that in 2019, IDR 97.5 trillion was lost from Indonesia because people sought medical treatment abroad. The number hit the biggest record in Southeast Asia. I’m not going to write details about the meeting, but one thing for sure is we need to make some improvements in health services that involve so many aspects: government policy, the private sector, education, people’s behavior or customs, and the distribution of health facilities in a country consisting of 17,380 islands and with a total population of 280 million people. Let’s just take all of those aside and just focus on what’s on our turf, our hospital. So… what kind of improvement can we make for our hospital? What factors do other countries have that make Indonesians prefer to go to them rather than us? Before we go that far, we need to know how people see us as health providers. We need to know their feedback. This is why, after I had more free time, I made an initiative to conduct a survey by distributing simple questionnaires to friends and asking about their complaints and satisfaction with health services provided by their chosen private hospitals in Jakarta and surrounding areas (Jabodetabek). Beyond my expectations, I had succeeded in gathering results from 147 respondents with the following demographics: middle economic class, patients of private hospitals in Jakarta, and domiciled in Jabodetabek (Jakarta-Bogor-Depok-Tanggerang-Bekasi).

I asked six questions, but I will share two of the results in this article. The most important questions are: What do you like and dislike about your chosen private hospital? Below is the chart graphic of the survey.

Based on these findings, we can conclude that people choose private hospitals because of their near location, excellent service, experienced doctors, and good and clean facilities. While they have complaints about a few things, such as the expensive bill charge, long waiting or queues, and not enough parking space. Through these results, as for the medical service aspect, we can achieve their satisfactions. But for the management aspect, we need to do some improvement. We need to manage the long queue or long waiting in some spots, such as registration, clinic waiting room, cashier, and pharmacy, by analyzing the service blueprint. Ow… I think the service blueprint will need its own article. We’ll talk about it later on; we need to be more detailed. Managing the crowd is also important to reduce the long queue process by managing the doctor’s schedule more thoughtfully. Especially if you have two or three doctors who bring a lot of patients who are sharing the same practice schedule and the clinic rooms are near each other. You can imagine what the compact waiting room feels like, not to mention the parking lot is swarming with cars.

I do realize one thing: the communication skills of our doctors nowadays are far better than 20-30 years ago. Back then, it was more like one-way communication; patients rarely could have discussions with their doctors. But now… the healthcare service is leaning towards being patient-centered, which is a very good transformation. I went to a hospital in a neighboring country. I was accompanying a close relative who came for the first time to the hospital, and we were already a bit late because of the flight schedule. So we came directly from the airport to the hospital. While we were walking around with our suitcase in our hand to the front counter, I heard someone calling for his name from across the lobby. It was a nurse directing us to the doctor’s clinic. I was beyond surprised; they are practicing ‘customer recognition.’ You can find it in my previous article about customer recognition in the last paragraph at “The Mecca of Hoteliers.” They knew how travelling can be exhausting for sick people, so instead of directing him to the registration counter first, they rushed him to the consultation room to get examined by the doctor. And of course, no waiting. Different place, different custom. Yes, I’m aware that we cannot compare other countries with ours. Do keep in mind that the ratio between healthcare providers and the 280 million population makes our hospital always feel crowded. What we can do is manage the crowd and perfect the Hospital Management Information System (SIMRS) to create a seamless patient journey.