Measuring healthcare process quality: applications in public hospitals in Turkey

Process improvement activities are becoming an essential part of a number of healthcare organizations. As the popularity of process improvement grows, the need for common objective measures is becoming more critical. Numerous quality measures have been suggested to evaluate healthcare quality. However, applications utilizing the existing quality measures mostly focus on the quality of specific diseases, clinics or clinical areas. Although these measures or measurement sets contain structure, process or output type measures, they do not provide a comprehensive approach that can cover all healthcare processes. The need for a comprehensive measurement was the motivation for us to develop the Healthcare Process Quality Measurement Model (HPQMM) presented in this paper. The model is applied to the laboratory and assessment processes in three public hospitals. The applications enabled the hospitals to measure their processes objectively, identify their weaknesses and strengths, and compare their processes with other hospitals. In this paper, we describe the application of HPQMM in three public hospitals and present a discussion of the results.