A Framework for Evaluation of Health Care Quality in India and Iran

The health scenario all over the world indicates that despite having numerous excellent health care facilities, there exists a sufficiently large gap between the demand and delivery. With increasing competition, advances in medical sciences, and rising patient expectations, the health care systems have become complex organizations. They need to obtain an optimum balance between the resources and patient satisfaction. Total quality management (TQM) has a great potential to address quality problems in a wide range of industries and improve the organizational performance. The growing need to take initiatives by hospitals in countries like India and Iran to improve the service quality and reduce wastage of resources has inspired the authors to develop a survey instrument to measure health care quality and performance. The data are collected from the capital cities and their nearby places in India and Iran. Using factor analysis, ten dimensions of quality practices and performance have been identified and validated empirically for the final version of the proposed framework.