Handbook of Healthcare Analytics

5 Quality of Care

Hummy Song and Senthil Veeraraghavan

University of Pennsylvania

5.1 Frameworks for Measuring Healthcare Quality

Quality of service is an instrumental component of the service provision process. Through a large corpus of theoretical and empirical research in service operations, we now have an increasingly better understanding of how to calibrate and measure quality in various service settings. Nevertheless, despite the vast literature on service quality, there exists little consensus in the operations research/management science (OR/MS) community around what constitutes a good measure of healthcare quality and which aspects of quality should be emphasized. Furthermore, there is an operations management literature recognizing the complex interactions between various service attributes, such as service quality and service speed (Anand et al., 2011), which is relevant to our understanding of service quality in the healthcare setting as well.

While the research on healthcare quality might be relatively nascent in the field of OR/MS, there exist well‐established frameworks around quality measurement in the field of health services research. Our overview in this work presents a helpful starting point for OR/MS scholars to position, enhance, and contribute further to the study of healthcare quality.

5.1.1 The Donabedian Model

The most widely‐used framework for quality measurement in health services research originates from the seminal framework proposed by ...