After National Health Insurance covered Chinese medicine outpatient in 1995, the utilization of Chinese medicine has increased rapidly. The number of outpatient from twenty-two million in 1995 increased to thirty four million in 2004. The claimed expenditure grew up to 16 billion in 2004 from 6.94 billion in 1995. Health care quality was the core of health care reform. People thought that health care quality was the most important foundation of health care. What is the expectancy and feeling of Chinese medicine service for people? How will we promote Chinese medicine quality and satisfy patients' expectancy? It's a key issue for Chinese medicine development in the future. In recent years, there were many studies related to medical care service quality and satisfaction. Some studies emphasize the aspect of structure quality, which only reflects the capability or potential ability of the providers to provide better medical care quality but does not know the real service quality. Some other previous researches used structure- process- outcome as the evaluation content, which would not let us understand the difference between physicians？HHHH？HHHH perceived quality and patients？HHHH？HHHH received quality. The purpose of this research would like to apply the theory of services quality gap to investigate the service quality of Chinese medicine. So, we will investigate the service quality of Chinese medicine according to the theory of quality gaps. The questionnaire will be designed based on the Chinese medicine quality indictors that were constructed in our previous study. One hundred twnety Chinese medicine physicians and Six hundred atients will be surveyed to answer the questions. The theory of services quality gap will be used to analyze the service quality gap. This research would like to find out the difference between the patients' expectation and patients' feelings, and the difference between physician's perception of patients' expectation and patients' expectation for Chinese medicine services. In addition, this research would like to use multiple regression analysis to explore the factors that affect service quality gaps. We also will apply Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) to identify the necessary improvement service items for Chinese medicine services. The results of this study will provide the important reference for service quality improvement for Chinese medicine in the future.
