The idea that outcomes associated with the provision of health care are important is not new. In the 1960s Avedis Donabedian (1) presented health outcomes as changes in health status that were attributable to antecedent health care. For many years, however, evaluations of health care focused on the structure or process of care. As health care moves into the new millennium, financing of health c...

AGAINST THE BACKGROUND of the debate on quality assurance in nonprofit organizations (Chaffee and Sherr, 1993) and growing economic constraints on nonprofit professional opera companies (Coe, 1994), the issue of measuring artistic performance in opera companies comes to the fore. The management literature has explicitly discussed quality and quality management since the end of the 1980s (Hackma...

As pressure to improve the quality and safety of healthcare delivery continues, debates have ensued regarding which measures are sensitive to or affected by individual providers, technology, and healthcare systems (Doran, 2003). Outcomes must be identifi ed uniformly and systematically to provide patients and consumers the information they need to make informed choices about their care. Healthc...

BACKGROUND Although agreement about the need for quality improvement in health care is almost universal, the means of achieving effective improvement in overall care is not well understood. Avedis Donabedian developed the structure-process-outcome framework in which to think about quality-improvement efforts. ISSUE There is now a robust evidence-base in the quality-improvement literature on p...

OBJECTIVES The Institute of Medicine (IOM) has recommended the development of national standards for the measurement of emergency care performance. The authors undertook this study with the goals of enumerating and categorizing existing performance measures relevant to pediatric emergency care. METHODS Potential performance measures were identified through a survey of 1) the peer-reviewed lit...

D uring the past several years, one of the most perplexing issues for surgeons has been the assessment of quality of care. We, however, owe it to ourselves and our patients to master the substantive issues that underlie current discussions about this subject. What is quality care? Many definitions have been proposed. Donabedian developed the classic triad for measuring quality in health care: s...

OBJECTIVE To evaluate the structure, process and results of the Capillary Blood Glucose Self-monitoring Program in a Brazilian city. METHOD Epidemiological, cross-sectional study. The methodological framework of Donabedian was used to construct indicators of structure, process and outcome. A random sample (n = 288) of users enrolled and 96 health professionals who worked in the program was st...

INTRODUCTION The existence of maternal health service does not guarantee its use by women; neither does the use of maternal health service guarantee optimal outcomes for women. The World Health Organization recommends monitoring and evaluation of maternal satisfaction to improve the quality and efficiency of health care during childbirth. Thus, this study aimed at assessing maternal satisfactio...

Background. Ensuring patient satisfaction is an important means of secondary prevention of maternal mortality. This study presents findings from a multidimensional study of client satisfaction from the Gamo Gofa Zone in Southwest Ethiopia. Methods. A facility based cross-sectional study using exit interviews was conducted from 2014. Client satisfaction was measured using a survey adopted from t...