COST OF QUALITY IN HEALTH CARE: A CASE STUDY IN CLINICAL LABORATORY

In today's environment, many laboratories are challenged to maintain or increase their quality while simultaneously lowering their overall costs. The objective of this research is to use the Cost of Quality (COQ) model to estimate the Cost of Quality-related activities at Clinical Laboratory located in Morocco. Using data collected during six month, we allocated the direct costs associated with quality-related activities in the laboratory across COQ's cost categories: prevention, appraisal, internal failures, and external failures. We found that approximately 83% of total cost of quality was spent on costs of "good quality" (prevention and appraisal), while 17% was spent on costs of "poor quality" (internal and external failures). The high percentage of cost of quality spent on prevention and appraisal activities is consistent with efforts to ensure high quality laboratory results. The paper introduces the COQ model and illustrates how it can be applied to a clinical laboratory setting. We begin with an overview of the COQ concept and its four main cost categories, followed by an illustration of how the model can be applied. We then discuss some of advantages of this methodology.