The physician and employee judgment system: reliability and validity of a hospital quality measurement method

Hospitals engaged in quality improvement must measure and assess customer perceptions of hospital services. Hospital customers are either "external"--patients, their families, and payers--or "internal"--physicians and hospital employees. This article describes two measurement systems designed to gather information from internal customers about the quality of hospital services. One system targets physicians, the other hospital employees. This article describes how these systems were developed and pilot-tested, and how the results were analyzed. Analysis of results showed the systems to be reliable, valid, and representative. The article also addresses limitations of the research (focus on general acute-care hospitals), interesting findings and implications (the correlation between physicians' and employees' ratings of hospital quality), and uses of these measures in corporate-level and hospital-level quality improvement (measuring trends and identifying specific opportunities for improvement).