India's hospital sector — comprising 74,000 hospitals, 1.7 million beds, and a USD 372 billion healthcare market — is structurally bifurcated between a public sector with universal access aspiration but underresourced operational capacity, a private sector with superior clinical outcomes but affordability barriers for the non-insured population, and an emerging NABH-accredited quality care tier reshaping patient expectations. The National Accreditation Board for Hospitals and Healthcare Providers (NABH) accreditation, adopted by 832 hospitals as of 2024, provides benchmarks for clinical quality, patient safety, and operational efficiency whose measurable impact on patient outcomes has not been systematically evaluated. This multi-level analysis covers 186 Indian hospitals (62 public, 82 private, 42 NABH-accredited) across 8 states, measuring operational efficiency through Data Envelopment Analysis across 7 departments, patient satisfaction through SERVQUAL 5-dimension scale (4,284 respondents), and clinical quality indicators. Multilevel regression confirms that NABH accreditation is independently associated with higher SERVQUAL scores (β=0.64, p<0.001), lower Hospital-Acquired Infection rates (−38%, p<0.001), and lower 30-day readmission (−34%, p<0.001), after controlling for hospital size, ownership, and case mix. The Monash University collaboration contributes the DEA operational efficiency methodology from Australian healthcare benchmarking.
Reinhold Gruen (Sat,) studied this question.