Quality function deployment in healthcare. Methods for meeting customer requirements in redesign and renewal

In the current decade, client requirements appear to play an increasingly important role in designing not-for-profit organisations, in particular in the domains of services and healthcare. Quality function deployment (QFD) is a well-known design method. This method has a vested reputation in industrial production as a means of systematically incorporating customer requirements in product design. However, in the domain of the services, and especially the professional services, there is little experience in applying QFD. Application in this domain probably causes problems, for instance with respect to the customer concept, which is more ambiguous in this domain, and with respect to the interrelated nature of the product (service) and the process. In this paper we present some limitations of conventional QFD outside physical industrial production and we present a refinement and an extension of QFD for healthcare applications, based on research methods in the social sciences. Illustrations are given from two cases in Dutch healthcare organisations.