Preparing for the Technology Revolution in Health Care

Quality is something we expect in every service encounter we experience. From the grocery store where we shop to the restaurants in which we eat, we are very attentive to those aspects of service that do not measure up to our expectations of quality and we expect someone to correct it so that it does meet our expectations. When we think of health care, which also is a service industry, we have thoughts about the quality of the encounters we have personally experienced or that of friends or loved ones. The quality of many of those encounters could be considered good, but we also are aware of the poor quality side of health care. But how do we come to the conclusion about whether the overall quality of any service experience is good or bad? If what we experience firsthand or read or hear about a particular service experience consists of a mixture of mostly good and a little bad, and without anything else to suggest that it should be otherwise or that it is different anywhere else, we will naturally make such service levels our expectation and accept them as the norm.