Managing perceptions of hospital quality. Negative emotional evaluations can undermine even the best clinical quality.

Patients use more than 500 criteria to evaluate a hospital's quality. The authors synthesized these criteria into 14 dimensions to provide the foundation of a new instrument for measuring service quality in health care. Patients use emotional criteria to evaluate technical quality. Therefore, hospitals must not neglect the emotional aspects of cure. Developed around three theoretical components--structure, process, and outcome--the quality dimensions should help hospital marketers pinpoint what is important to patients and how they perceive the service encounter.