Balancing Hospital's Financials through Implementing Cost of Quality Models

Abstract

Purpose: Hospitals integrate different quality improvement models such as lean and cost of quality to identify the wastes resulted from the cost of poor quality and spot the opportunities for improving the cost of good quality. This study reviews the literature related to these two models and highlights its implementation in the healthcare sector.
 Design: the study is based on a systematic-review of previous literature and summarizes the best modules and practices of cost of quality in healthcare sector.
 Findings: One of the main research implications is that accounting and quality assurance teams have to cooperate and share information to reduce undesirable costs and improve the hospital’s financials. However, future studies are encouraged to expand the research empirically to discover hidden costs of quality and implement different improvement quality models to enrich the literature.
 Originality: It is a complicated task to balance between reducing the cost and providing a high quality service. This study is targeted for quality, finance and accounting managers and it highlights the main issues for measuring the cost of quality in hospitals.