Customer focused health‐care performance instruments: making a case for local measures

Abstract

In the face of increasing pressure to improve patient satisfaction, the health‐care industry must continue to seek improved methods to measure the effects of its continuous improvement efforts. While measurement instruments in this area abound, most are global in perspective and inflexible in form, sometimes leading to less than optimally germane outputs. Patient satisfaction information is critically important to the health‐care provider, and this paper presents the results provided by an instrument that was locally designed to provide the most utile aggregation and presentation of patient satisfaction information for individual health‐care providers. These results provide substantial evidence to support the notion that local, rather than global, measurement instruments are needed to provide the most relevant and useful results when assessing patient satisfaction as part of a continuous improvement effort.

Citation

Swinehart, K.D. and Smith, A.E. (2004), "Customer focused health‐care performance instruments: making a case for local measures", International Journal of Health Care Quality Assurance, Vol. 17 No. 1, pp. 9-16. https://doi.org/10.1108/09526860410515891