Competitive benchmarking of health care quality using the analytic hierarchy process: an example from Korean cancer Clinics

Abstract

Faced with mounting competitive pressures and continued health care reforms, a growing number of health care providers have begun to realize that their future success rests on the ability to undertake a continuous improvement of health care quality. The process of continuous improvement of health care quality is facilitated by health care providers developing reliable quality measures through competitive benchmarking. In an effort to develop a meaningful set of guidelines for competitive benchmarking, and determine comparative measures of health care quality of medical clinics, this paper proposes an analytic hierarchy process (AHP) that can help medical clinics formulate viable service improvement strategies in the increasingly competitive health care industry. This paper also illustrates the usefulness of the proposed health care quality measures using the case of prominent Korean cancer clinics.