Title: Innovation in healthcare services: a customer-focused approach

Authors: Prasanta Kumar Dey, Seetharaman Hariharan, William Ho

Addresses: Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK. ' Anaesthesia and Intensive Care, The University of the West Indies, St. Augustine, Trinidad. ' Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham B4 7ET, UK

Abstract: Although the various tools and techniques of quality management are routinely deployed in order to improve healthcare quality, an integrated approach is lacking, which combines the customer focus to identify quality issues, analytical techniques for prioritising improvement measures and a project management approach to plan, implement and evaluate the improvement projects. This study develops an innovative framework using Quality Function Deployment (QFD) and a logical framework in order to address this issue, and demonstrates its effectiveness using a case study on the intensive care unit of a hospital.

Keywords: healthcare innovation; critical care; quality function deployment; QFD; logical framework; project management; quality management; healthcare quality; customer focus; intensive care units; hospitals.

DOI: 10.1504/IJIL.2009.024135

International Journal of Innovation and Learning, 2009 Vol.6 No.4, pp.387 - 405

Published online: 27 Mar 2009 *

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