Strategic service quality management for health care

Quality management has become one of the most important and most debated topics within the service sector. This is especially true for health care, as the controversy rages on how the existing American system should be restructured. Health care reform aimed at reducing costs and ensuring access to all Americans cannot be allowed to jeopardize the quality of care. As such, total quality management (TQM) has become a vital ingredient to strategic planning within the health care domain. At the heart of any such quality improvement effort is the issue of measurement. TQM cannot be effectively utilized as a competitive weapon unless quality can be accurately defined, measured, evaluated, and monitored over time. Through such analysis a hospital can elect how to expend its limited resources toward those quality improvement projects which will impact customer perceptions of service quality the most. Thus, the purpose of this report is to establish a framework by which to approach the issue of quality measurement, delineate the various components of quality that exist in health care, and explore how these elements affect one another. We propose that the issue of quality measurement in health care be approached as an integration of service quality attributes common to other service organizations and technical quality attributes unique to health care. We hope that this research will serve as a first step toward the synthesis of the various quality attributes inherent in the health care domain and encourage other researchers to address the interactions of the various quality attributes.