The internal customer

To realize the full potential of CQI, the needs of internal customers throughout the health care organization must be met. This is best done through a collaborative customer-supplier dialogue, where suppliers take the initiative to understand their internal customers' needs and make their own requirements clear. Unfortunately, physicians--the most critical group of internal customers--are unaccustomed to collaborative efforts and are often unwilling to participate in CQI training. The solution is to use the customer-supplier dialogue to understand physicians' unique needs so that they can be trained effectively and drawn into the CQI process.