Methodological considerations on the assessment of the implementation of quality management systems.

Quality management systems (QMS) can be considered as an emerging management technology in health care. It is as yet not common to perform assessment of such technology in order to obtain relevant information on the added value. In this paper the specific aspects of the assessment of a quality management system are explored and various designs are presented. Based on the experiences of performing an evaluation of a QMS in a rehabilitation hospital an improved design for an evaluation study is presented.