Health Policy 54 (2000) 187–200 Methodological considerations on the assessment of the implementation of quality management systems Willem H. van Harten a,b, *, Ton F. Casparie c , Olaf A.M. Fisscher b a Rehabilitation Centre, Het Roessingh, Enschede, The Netherlands b Faculty of Technology and Management, Uniersity Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands c Department of Health Policy Management, Erasmus Uniersity, Rotterdam, The Netherlands Received 17 July 2000; accepted 26 July 2000 Abstract 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 rehabilita- tion hospital an improved design for an evaluation study is presented. © 2000 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Quality management systems; Health care; Hospital www.elsevier.com/locate/healthpol 1. Introduction In recent years quality-management systems (QMS) have been introduced in health care organisations in many countries. These approaches are often copied from manufacturing industry or for-profit service-providers; in literature there is little systematic evidence of the exact added value of investments in quality management, neither in industry, nor in health care [1 – 4]. * Corresponding author. Tel.: +31-53-4875385; fax: +31-53-4339655. 0168-8510/00/$ - see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved. PII:S0168-8510(00)00110-X