Quality Management System for Hospitals
Hospital services in our country, whether high end Multi or Single Specialty, Tertiary or Secondary Care or first level Primary Health Centres, most suffer because of an unstructured co-ordination between support functions, right from registration to the final discharge of the patient. Whether it is maintaining or recording the history of customer health, or providing timely services like nursing, diet supply, housekeeping or equipment management (very little in these days of advanced technology), it is increasingly being felt that the patients just don't feel medication alone as all important but are equally sensitive to other components of the health care support services too.
Implementing a Quality Management System like the NABH helps to integrate all these disparate functions in the Hospital to give the best quality of service to the customers of the Hospital - the Patients.
The major benefits to any Hospital from Implementing quality standards are:
Organisational Benefits
- Standardization - Helps the Hospital set up achievable set of Quality of Service Levels.
- Helps build up a quality conscious Organization, through all round awareness of the importance of quality.
Service Related Benefits
- Service Quality - Consistency in the quality of service achieved in time.
- Enhanced Patient Satisfaction.
- Better Quality of Care - Standardization of support services assists medical professionals in providing better quality of care.
Operational Benefits
- Increased Productivity - Quality Conscious, Trained and motivated employees working towards the common goal of quality, leads to exponential increase in productivity.
- Cost Savings - The savings achieved through a well documented and standardized process is tremendous.
- Procurement / storage costs by better vendor selection, standardization of materials, less inspection/rejection, identification of slow/non-moving items
- Employee costs, by conducting training/awareness programmes, improving motivation levels and reducing employee turnover
- Equipment Costs, by better utilization and maintenance practices, like setting up preventive maintenance schedules
- Liability costs, with increasing Consumer Protection Act related litigation a quality approach is the best insurance in avoiding liability costs in settlements and legal costs
- Increased Footfall resulting from reducing customer complaints through a more responsive & focussed customer care
- Efficient Operation of Support Services - The functioning of various support services can be streamlined to achieve maximum efficiency and resource utilization
Other Benefits
- International Acceptance and Visibility - Accreditation and Certification could be an effective marketing and branding tool for the Hospital.
- Corporate & Institutional Clients - Will lead to increased business from the corporate and institutional clients through empanelment for employee reimbursements and packages like pre-employment and annual check-ups.
- Third Party Payment Systems - The opening up of the insurance market has lead to increase in patients through Third party payments, Insurance companies, Third Party Administrators (TPA), Health Maintenances Organizations (HMO). Quality Accreditations are soon becoming mandatory for tie-ups with such players, which is likely to form a huge percentage of patient traffic in coming years.
