Service Quality Assessment in Healthcare Systems
Summary
Service quality assessment in healthcare systems encompasses multidimensional evaluations of patient experience, clinical effectiveness and organisational responsiveness. Traditional frameworks have drawn upon general service literature to adapt dimensions such as reliability, assurance, tangibles, empathy and responsiveness to the clinical context. More recent work has broadened this approach to include technical quality measures—such as adherence to clinical protocols—and patient-reported experience measures (PREMs), which capture subjective perceptions of care delivery. Digital tools and real-time feedback systems now complement survey instruments, enabling continuous quality improvement cycles. Globally, efforts have focused on reconciling standardised metrics with local cultural and economic contexts, ensuring that models developed in one region can be adapted to another without sacrificing validity. The integration of data from electronic health records, patient portals and wearable devices promises to enrich service quality assessment by linking patient satisfaction with clinical outcomes. Practical applications range from benchmarking hospital departments and intensive care units to informing policy in primary healthcare centres and community clinics. As health systems face increasing demands for transparency and accountability, service quality assessment has become central to performance management, accreditation processes and strategic planning.
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Service Quality Assessment in Healthcare Systems publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in service quality assessment in healthcare systems across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
SERVQUAL: A survey-based tool measuring service quality across five dimensions—reliability, assurance, tangibles, empathy and responsiveness.
HEALTHQUAL: An adaptation of SERVQUAL designed specifically for primary healthcare settings, incorporating additional technical quality indicators.
Importance–Performance Analysis: A method plotting the importance of service attributes against performance scores to prioritise quality improvement efforts.
Patient-Reported Experience Measures (PREMs): Standardised questionnaires that capture patients’ perspectives on their interactions with healthcare providers and services.
References
- Healthcare service quality-measurement models: a review. Journal of Health Research (2021).
- Identification of quality gaps in healthcare services using the SERVQUAL instrument and importance-performance analysis in medical intensive care: a prospective study at a medical center in Taiwan. BMC Health Services Research (2020).
- Quality assessment of services provided by health centers in Mashhad, Iran: SERVQUAL versus HEALTHQUAL scales. BMC Health Services Research (2021).
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