A Comparative Study between the Performance of ISO 9001Certified and Non-Certified Hospitals and Health Care Centers: The Case of Tehran Province

Abstract

Based on the increasing interest of the hospitals and health care centers to acquire the ISO 9001 certification and to implement this standard to enhance the quality of services they provide for their patients, the main objective of this study was to compare the relative performances of the certified hospitals and health care centers with the non-certified ones as a case study within the Tehran province, Iran. For this purpose, a field survey questionnaire was designed to collect information required for the assessment of the statistical significant differences between the performances of the two mentioned groups of hospitals and health care centers. The obtained results revealed that the ISO 9001 certified hospitals and health care centers outperform the non-certified ones regarding the fast respond to the customers, flexibility of the employee’s operation, quality design, customer satisfaction as well as the employee’s satisfaction. Based on the results, it was concluded that the non-certified hospitals and health care centers, in order to enhance the quality of their services which eventually would lead to the higher level of customer satisfaction, must obtain the mentioned certificate to effectively implement the ISO 9001 standard.