Manajemen Operasi – Kuliah 6

MATERI:
Who defines quality? The customer! If the customer is responsible for defining
the quality he or she wants, the provider of the product/service is responsible
for delivering that quality. As a result, a broad, common definition of quality
involves exceeding customers’ expectations. There are two elements in this
definition: (a) the customers and (b) their expectations. Let us focus on
customers first. For many businesses, it is easy to identify the customer:
patrons in a restaurant, shoppers in a clothing store, readers in a library, and
so on, but who is the “customer” in healthcare? Although the patient is the
ultimate customer, there are many processes required to care for patients that
involve multiple customers. If you consider treatment, the customer is the
patient. If you examine the delivery of supplies to the operating room, the
customers are the doctors and nurses. In the case of billing, the customer is an
insurance company, an individual, or a third-party administrator. In fact, we
could consider accrediting agencies as customers of the providers’ quality
reports. One simple way to identify the customer is to adopt the “next
process” concept: View the customer as the beneficiary of the next step in the
process of healthcare delivery.
SERVQUAL was tested in multiple consumer samples before its publication,
and has been used extensively in academic research. Although the
psychometric properties of the scale are not perfect, there is a general
consensus that SERVQUAL provides a comprehensive measurement of
consumers’ perceptions of service quality. In summary, patients may not be
able to assess the clinical quality of the care they receive, but they can voice
their opinion about their experience of care.