Global progress toward universal health coverage requires expanding access to high quality essential health services. A key component of quality of health services is client experience, which encompasses the consumer perspective of receiving care. Although globally prioritized as an evaluation criterium for health systems and programs, no unified or regularly implemented approach has emerged for measuring client experience of care. This rapid review examines how client experience has been measured in the research literature in low- and middle-income countries for primary care, malaria, HIV, and sexual and reproductive health. Overall, we identified no unified approach to measuring client experience of care across health areas. Within health areas, measures were rarely used consistently across studies. Many measures were not practical for routine monitoring or lacked evidence of validity. This review indicates a clear need to develop, validate, and deploy a measurement approach for client experience that can be used across health areas and delivery channels in low- and middle-income countries. The development and validation of client experience measures that can be used more broadly across programs will be critical to monitoring and improving quality of care as we deepen our understanding of consumer-powered healthcare and make progress toward universal health coverage.
