Testing Hospital Quality Strategic Determinants

Abstract

Hospital administrators are motivated to improve hospital quality in the eyes of their patients, healthcare quality regulators, and accrediting organizations. This study empirically tests the importance of some strategic determinants of hospital quality by collecting data using an emailed questionnaire filled by 258 chief quality officers. The results supported the importance of competitive intelligence, strategic leadership, management of technology, specific characteristics of the change process, and organization culture as major determinants of hospital quality.  Based on the results, the report makes recommendations on where to direct their efforts, including understanding how to measure these important factors. The important model tested here has not been proposed before and provides several research opportunities for perhaps expanding the model and account for unexplained variance in hospital quality, including other constructs potentially being moderators and mediators for the hypothesized relationships.