title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Management and Marketing, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, Tennessee, USA.
authors.forename: Kerry D
authors.initials: KD
authors.lastname: Swinehart
authors.forename: Allen E
authors.initials: AE
authors.lastname: Smith
mesh_terms: D003266:Continuity of Patient Care; D003625:Data Collection; D003628:Database Management Systems; D019033:Delivery of Health Care, Integrated / Q000592:standards*; D006761:Hospitals / Q000592:standards; D006801:Humans; D007256:Information Systems; D008329:Managed Care Programs / Q000592:standards*; D010043:Outcome and Process Assessment, Health Care / Q000379:methods*; D017060:Patient Satisfaction / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D010934:Planning Techniques; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013714:Tennessee; D017749:Total Quality Management / Q000379:methods*; D014481:United States