Optimizing the stake holder’s perspective on enhancing the service quality in health care

Abstract

For the success of health care organizations, accurate measurement of health care service quality is as important as understanding the nature of the service delivery system. Without a valid measure, it would be difficult to establish and implement appropriate tactics or strategies for service quality management. Experts have struggled for decades to formulate a concise, meaningful and generally applicable definition of the quality of health care. However, the complexity and variability of many definitions are very confusing even to experts. Patients, service providers and other parties involved in the process of health care service delivery, understand and describe service quality in different ways. Different perspectives on health care quality lead to different expectations and different methods of quality measurement. Patients tend to evaluate health care quality according to the responsiveness to their specific needs. Most patients define quality as efforts of physicians to do everything possible for a patient. Patient’s expectations about the health care system may differ from those of health care professionals and managers. On the other hand, patients cannot evaluate many technical aspects of health care service quality. Physicians can provide a high level technical quality but still be rated low by patients because of the lack of humanity, responsiveness or satisfaction. For physicians and other health care providers measurement of service quality has typically been driven by medical outcomes. However, outcomes indicative of quality may differ for a patient and physician. Health care administrators often use managerial input measures such as the average number of nursing hours required for an outpatient surgery. This research paper aims to explore the ways and means towards optimizing the competing stake holders perspectives on enhancing the service quality in health care