Medical Records Services Quality Gap Using SERVQUAL Model in Educational Hospitals of Isfahan

Medical Records services as one of the indicators of Allied Health Sciences in order to demonstrate the work efficiency and quality of healthcare work is a valuable benchmark. Medical records department play an important role in assessment and planning of prioritization quantity and quality of healthcare and its staff from legal and ethical perspective should be held accountable for the quality of information registry and this fact have direct connection with services quality so their perspective in determining the quality of services in health institutions has a special position. This study evaluates the quality of medical records department services from the perspectives of medical records personnel in teaching hospitals of Isfahan. This was an applied and descriptive- survey research with statistical population of medical records personnel employed in teaching hospitals of Isfahan in 2013 (96 people, all the research population). In order to collect data Servqual standard questionnaire based on the five dimensions of assurance, responsiveness, empathy, reliability and tangibles were used based on likert scale rating. Since in preparing the questionnaire, qualitative perspective of Parasurman - Zeithamel was observed, and with attention to consulting with experts, questionnaire’ validity was confirmed. The reliability of the questionnaire calculated by Cronbach's alpha coefficients and was obtained 0.83 for the expectation and 0.88 for perceptions. SPSS software for data analysis and descriptive and inferential statistics were used. Two-way analysis showing the relationship among the gap between expectations and perceptions of the medical records department personnel in service's quality. The results show a significant difference between expectations and perceptions of medical records departments’ personnel in teaching hospital of service quality. The gap between expectations and perceptions were equal to: assurance (0.98), responsiveness (1.82), empathy (1.94), reliability (0.60) and tangibles (1.53). The biggest gap was related to empathy (1.94) and the smallest gap was related to reliability (0.60). In general, the largest quality gap in this research is the empathy dimension of staff. Efforts and planning of hospital management and heads of medical records departments to create the circumstances in which number of personnel to be determined by using the standard method, based on the sheer size and number of patients; can lead to raising the quality of the services.