CRITICAL ANALYSIS ON INCLUSION OF HEALTHCARE QUALITY DIMENSIONS

(Starr, 1982) defined Social Transformation of American Medicine and found that medicine has disappeared from a supreme profession to a massive industry. For decades, quality was taken for granted and Institute of Medicine (IOM), 2000 report showed, up to 98,000 deaths happened per year due to inevitable medical errors. The Institute of Medicine's “Crossing the Quality Chasm” report recommended six aims for upgrading healthcare quality.” Those aims were safety, equity, patientcenteredness, timeliness, effectiveness, and efficiency. According to India's 12th Five Year Plan at present, India's health care system consists of private sector providers. Inspite of private providers the Indian healthcare system suffers from many weaknesses such as quality of health care. This study focuses on the healthcare quality based on Institute of Medicine's six aims to assess their relevance with healthcare quality. This research study was designed as descriptive research study. The closed ended questionnaire was given to outpatients, inpatients or to the accompanying persons of 4 hospitals chosen for the study. Location of study was Karnataka. In this study multistage sampling was used for data collection. Sample size taken was 290. 5 point Likert's scale was used to collect responses for statement questions. While taking the IOM reports under consideration, this study has focused on health care quality aims and analyzed relationship among them in context of private hospitals in India. Findings of the study revealed that among all healthcare quality dimensions patient centeredness followed by safety showed highest correlation with healthcare quality. Hence these were the most important healthcare dimensions where healthcare providers can focus for healthcare quality improvement.