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Open research questions in Healthcare Quality and Management

96 gap statements mined from Healthcare Quality and Management papers in our 4.5M-paper local library, which holds 956 papers on the topic — drawn mostly from each paper's own stated research gap, future-work, challenge and limitation notes, and its abstract. The ones listed below are a selection still marked open; each names the study that raised it, with a DOI link where the paper has one.

Choosing where to publish on Healthcare Quality and Management? See the ranked Medicine journals.

What the literature leaves open

  • The integration of Total Quality Management and the Balanced Scorecard in healthcare remains underexplored. The literature on these tools and healthcare governance has developed largely apart. There is a need for a framework that addresses the dual requirement of sustaining clinical care quality and accounting for it to various stakeholders.

    Integrating Total Quality Management and the Balanced Scorecard in Healthcare: Toward a Quality Governance Framework for Accountability and Resilience · 2026 · DOI

  • The lack of a universally accepted definition of quality of care. The insufficiency of the Donabedian model to fully capture the patient's subjective experience or the dynamic interactions within modern health systems. Limitations related to contextual generalizability and bias.

    Assessment of Patients’ Quality of Care in Healthcare Systems: A Comprehensive Narrative Literature Review · 2025 · DOI

  • Future research should focus on enhancing postoperative care processes, with particular attention to the organization of care, human resources, and communication.

    Barriers to Quality Perioperative Care and Postoperative Mortality Variations in Elective Abdominal Surgery: A Mixed-Methods Study · 2026 · DOI

  • In addition to items that were lacking, as seen in item 2, there were several items that were either not working or expired.

    Re-Audit of Physical Health Equipment Available at the Mount Old Age Psychiatric Hospital · 2025 · DOI

  • Some professionals also noted a lack of standardized email response guidelines, leading to inconsistency in practices.

    Enhancing Email Responsiveness in Mental Health Services: A Quality Improvement Initiative · 2025 · DOI

  • While an impact beyond treatment outcomes has been suggested, accreditation's broader effects on population health and potential spillovers across regions remain unclear.

    Does access to quality accreditation improve health? - Patient-level evidence from German cancer care · 2025 · DOI

  • Importance: Despite widespread use to guide patients to hospitals providing the best care, it remains unknown whether Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) hospital star ratings are a reliable measure of hospital surgical quality.

    Variation in Postoperative Outcomes Across Federally Designated Hospital Star Ratings · 2024 · DOI

  • To our knowledge, this volume-outcome association has not been studied in ambulatory surgery centers (ASCs) in the US.

    Assessing the Ambulatory Surgery Center Volume-Outcome Association · 2024 · DOI

  • Quality frameworks exist for other areas of cardiac diagnostics but there is limited information on assessing quality in cardio-pulmonary exercise testing (CPET).

    Quality assurance in cardio-pulmonary exercise testing · 2024 · DOI

  • Most metrics lack evidence of usefulness, cost-effectiveness, reliability, or validity.

    Predictive Validity of Anesthesiologists’ Quality of Clinical Supervision and Nurse Anesthetists’ Work Habits Assessed by Their Associations With Operating Room Times · 2024 · DOI

  • Leading health systems have invested in substantial quality improvement capacity building, but little is known about the aggregate effect of these investments at the health system level.

    Evaluating Improvement Collaboratives in Quality Improvement Projects: Design Variations and Their Impact · 2024 · DOI

  • The long-term efficacy of hospital accreditation in sustaining IPC practices remains debated. There is a lack of longitudinal studies evaluating the outcomes of hospital accreditation.

    Sustaining Infection Prevention and Control Post-Accreditation: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Global Longitudinal Outcomes · 2026 · DOI

  • The study identifies the challenges of overlapping statutory mandates, limited technical capacity, inadequate inter-agency collaboration, and weak market surveillance. The study also highlights the challenge of regulatory duplication and operational inefficiencies.

    Mainstreaming Metrology Activities for Enhanced Consumer Protection: Mapping Enforcement Challenges within Tanzania’s Quality Infrastructure System · 2026 · DOI

  • Future research should focus on developing strategies to improve the effectiveness of regulatory enforcement and reduce the risks associated with substandard products. Future research should also explore the development of capacity-building initiatives to support the Tanzania Bureau of Standards and the Weights and Measures Agency.

    Mainstreaming Metrology Activities for Enhanced Consumer Protection: Mapping Enforcement Challenges within Tanzania’s Quality Infrastructure System · 2026 · DOI

  • The expertise gap identified in the data cannot be solved through legal training alone. There is an urgent need to build internal management capabilities, specifically focused on medical technology. This includes creating inter-disciplinary procurement teams that combine legal expertise with clinical and engineering insights.

    Beyond Performative Compliance: Mapping the Use of Standards and the Institutional Behaviour in the Romanian Healthcare Procurement · 2026 · DOI

  • For LMICs, there are evidence gaps as existing evidence is scarce, varied in the assessment of management capacity of PHC facilities and report a measurement gap due to the scarcity of assessment tools contextualised to the LMIC PHC setting.

    Management capacity of primary healthcare facilities in low- and middle-income countries: A scoping review · 2025 · DOI

  • The paper notes that the UK's often litigious culture can make it difficult for doctors to learn from mistakes. The creation of 'safe spaces' for whistle-blowers to speak up with legal protection is needed.

    Duty of candour in medicine · 2018 · DOI

  • Finally, a major obstacle to improving the quality of N/SVQ provision is the lack of data available at award level in England and Wales to determine the success or otherwise of particular NVQs.

    Level 4 N/SVQs in Training and Development 1992‐1994 · 1997 · DOI

  • The paper identifies a need for clarity on the distinctions and connections between accreditation, certification, and licensure. It highlights the importance of understanding the implications of these processes for institutions and individuals.

    Accreditation, certification, and licensure · 1987 · DOI

  • There is a need to assess the influence of accreditation on counselor education programs. There is a lack of research on faculty opinions concerning the effectiveness of the Standards as criteria for evaluating programs.

    Faculty Perceptions of CACREP Accreditation · 1986 · DOI

  • Despite these costs, the broader institutional impact of accreditation, particularly on patient volumes and care patterns, are poorly understood.

    Association of Rectal Cancer Accreditation with Patient Volume and Procedural Trends in the US · 2026 · DOI

  • The prerequisites for effective accreditation are not limited to the process itself; rather, they are heavily influenced by broader systemic issues related to the program, culture, resources, and overall design of the healthcare infrastructure.

    Prerequisites for implementing accreditation in Iran’s comprehensive healthcare centers: a qualitative study · 2025 · DOI

  • The study was limited by the inclusion of observational studies and was unable to robustly adjust for different populations across the studies, in particular the predominance of patients with higher socioeconomic status receiving treatment in CCCs.

    Best of both worlds? Linking comprehensive and noncomprehensive cancer centers · 2025 · DOI

  • A discrepancy exists between process compliance improvements (SMD = 0.58) and clinical outcome improvements (SMD = 0.42), requiring deep examination of the underlying pathophysiology and mechanisms linking processes to patient outcomes.

    Sustaining Infection Prevention and Control Post-Accreditation: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Global Longitudinal Outcomes · 2026 · DOI

  • Things to consider include the following: Who ‘s actually overseeing the treatment? Do they offer a consultation? What services are available? It is important that the med spa follows state laws with regard to who oversees and provides the procedure, but most states have little or no guidelines for med spas.

    Med Spas: Patient Safety and Accreditation · 2026 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Healthcare Quality and Management

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Open questions raised by papers listed on this page include: (1) The integration of Total Quality Management and the Balanced Scorecard in healthcare remains underexplored (“Integrating Total Quality Management and the Balanced Scorecard in Healthcare:…”, 2026); (2) Future research should focus on enhancing postoperative care processes, with particular attention to the organization of care, human resources, and communication (“Barriers to Quality Perioperative Care and Postoperative Mortality Variations…”, 2026); (3) There is a lack of longitudinal studies evaluating the outcomes of hospital accreditation (“Sustaining Infection Prevention and Control Post-Accreditation: A Systematic…”, 2026); (4) Future research should focus on developing strategies to improve the effectiveness of regulatory enforcement and reduce the risks associated with substandard products (“Mainstreaming Metrology Activities for Enhanced Consumer Protection: Mapping…”, 2026); (5) The lack of a universally accepted definition of quality of care (“Assessment of Patients’ Quality of Care in Healthcare Systems: A Comprehensive…”, 2025). 96 gap statements have been mined from Healthcare Quality and Management papers in our 4.5M-paper local library, which holds 956 papers on the topic; the gaps come from whichever of those papers state one. They are mostly the research gaps the authors state and the papers' abstracts, plus future-work, limitations and challenges passages. The ones listed below are a selection still marked open; each names the study that raised it, with a DOI link where the paper has one, so you can read the original claim in context.

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