A DSS for ISO9000 certification in the health service: a case study

The European Community market points out the need of overtaking the technical obstacle arising from national rules and laws which prevent the free trading of products and services and the cooperation among foreign companies. To make such a process easier and to harmonize the trades, a quality certification was found to assure the technical specifications of the products and the quality of the services offered. These rules has been collected in an E.C. law called ISO 9000. The conformity to ISO 9000 rules has now become a fundamental requirement and a key element for the competition of the manufacturing enterprises. At present the need to extend the quality parameters is spreading also in the Services field where both rules and their directives are rather indefinite. ISO 8402 rules, in fact, define the idea of quality as a whole of performance and features of a product or of a service that must satisfy declared or implicit needs. Our work has been carried out together with Dental Clinic of the University of Genoa which can be considered as a case study for similar structures. This paper focuses the importance to define clearly both the requirements of a customer and the characteristics of the Service in order to satisfy such requirements. This paper gives a practical solution to outline the policy and the objectives of a quality system for the particular health structure. The proposed software structure, written in Java Language, is a part of a decision support system which can be used in order to achieve the goal of an ISO 9000 certification in such environment. The proposed software structure also allows to define and to organize all data to be maintained according to ISO 9000 rules and can detect any deficiency which may compromise the quality standard.