Development of methodological approaches to assessing the quality of healthcare services

The article presents the author’s approach to developing a methodology for assessing the quality of healthcare services based on integration of econometric and socio-economic methods. Following the presentation of the materials in the article, the following key conclusions have been obtained: □ High quality of consumer healthcare services is not just a socially important parameter, but also an economically important one, describing the capabilities of healthcare facilities (healthcare organizations) to offer consumers (patients) technologically efficient and timely services that are in-demand on the market; □ There are several sets of methodological concepts of assessing the quality of healthcare services in the current scientific literature, which can be classified into two main groups: methods based on subjective approach and methods involving an objective assessment of the quality of healthcare services. Methods using the subjective approach imply assessment of the quality of services through customer satisfaction, which does not always give relevant and reliable information about the state of the quality characteristics of healthcare services; □ It is offered to integrate methods using objective approaches to assessing the quality of healthcare services into the unified methodological concept, which implies assessment of the quality of these services on the basis of the exponent multiplicative model. The article proposes a detailed formula toolkit to calculate indicators that form the proposed methodological model for assessment of the quality of healthcare services; □ It is substantiated that objective and subjective assessments do not always match in defining the actual level of quality characteristics of healthcare services. Due to this, the paper describes the key areas that can simultaneously provide growth of the value added in the service and growth of the customer value of such services. © 2017, SRAC - Societatea Romana Pentru Asigurarea Calitatii. All rights reserved.