Revista de prevención y atención de la salud

Abstracto

Evaluating the Costs of Quality in Health: An Approach to Improving Research and Development Processes

Guillermo Ramos Castro and Arialys Hernandez Nariño

Management, understood in contemporary terms, is the procedure of adapting resources of any kind to the purposes for which the resources have been collected (Inca, 2016). Quality management is a process of assurance and continuous improvement, where all areas of the entity actively participate in the development of products and services that satisfy the needs of users and society. This achieves greater quality, relevance and impact, with efficiency, efficacy and effectiveness. Quality means meeting the needs and expectations of internal clients (both medical and non-medical personnel) and external clients (patients and their families), which is sought not only in the final result, but in all functions of medical services. All of them can be suppliers and clients at the same time; therefore, it is vital to participate in the application of principles and tools for the continuous improvement of products and services, which would allow a change in the culture of the organization. Costs are the set of indicators that allow the efficiency of an entity's work to be evaluated; and represent the resources consumed and applied to activities in a given economic period. However, as Valenzuela Jiménez (2016) states, quality and poor quality costs have not received attention from traditional accounting theory and practices that allow business management to improve results and control waste. Only management accounting has addressed this issue, but its treatment has been limited to organizations that have adopted total quality management systems (TQM). Therefore, and due to the great impact that quality costs and poor quality costs (PQC) have on performance, it is convenient to establish useful techniques for the management and recording of these costs.