title: Managing perceptions of hospital quality. Negative emotional evaluations can undermine even the best clinical quality.
abstract: Patients use more than 500 criteria to evaluate a hospital's quality. The authors synthesized these criteria into 14 dimensions to provide the foundation of a new instrument for measuring service quality in health care. Patients use emotional criteria to evaluate technical quality. Therefore, hospitals must not neglect the emotional aspects of cure. Developed around three theoretical components--structure, process, and outcome--the quality dimensions should help hospital marketers pinpoint what is important to patients and how they perceive the service encounter.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Quality Center, Hudson, OH, USA.
authors.forename: G M
authors.initials: GM
authors.lastname: Zifko-Baliga
authors.forename: R F
authors.initials: RF
authors.lastname: Krampf
mesh_terms: D004644:Emotions; D005069:Evaluation Studies as Topic; D006302:Health Services Research / Q000379:methods; D015285:Hospital-Patient Relations; D006761:Hospitals / Q000592:standards*; D006801:Humans; D008389:Marketing of Health Services; D009723:Nurse-Patient Relations; D010043:Outcome and Process Assessment, Health Care / Q000458:organization & administration; D017060:Patient Satisfaction / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D010465:Perception; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D011787:Quality of Health Care / Q000145:classification*; D014481:United States