Integrated Quality Function Deployment as a Tool for Quality Achievement in Healthcare

Abstract

Quality function deployment (QFD) is a methodology that extracts client demands (CDs) and inducting them in the final service/product. Once CDs are extracted from client the traditional QFD approach uses absolute importance to identify the degree of importance for each CD. Direct evaluation of CDs based on absolute weighting without tradeoffs is easy to perform, but may lead to serious deviations from reality. An alternative to avoid this problem is to adopt the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) approach. In this paper, an integrated model combining AHP and QFD has been delineated as a quality achievement tool in healthcare. A case study is performed on the healthcare services provided by government general hospital, Indore District, Madhya Pradesh, India and data has been analyzed to benchmark the proposed framework by computing the degree of relative importance for CDs through AHP and incorporating them in subsequent deployment matrices.