Creation of a synthetic indicator of quality of care as a clinical management standard in primary care

INTRODUCTION The development of electronic medical records has allowed the creation of new quality indicators in healthcare. Among them, synthetic indicators facilitate global interpretation of results and comparisons between professionals. METHODS A healthcare quality standard (EQA, the Catalan acronym for Estàndard de Qualitat Assistencial) was constructed to serve as a synthetic indicator to measure the quality of care provided by primary care professionals in Catalonia (Spain). The project phases were to establish the reference population; select health problems to be included; define, select and deliberate about subindicators; and construct and publish the EQA. RESULTS Construction of the EQA involved 107 healthcare professionals, and 91 health problems were included. In addition, 133 experts were consulted, who proposed a total of 339 indicators. After systematic paired comparison, 61 indicators were selected to create the synthetic indicator. The EQA is now calculated on a monthly basis for more than 8000 healthcare professionals using an automated process that extracts data from electronic medical records; results are published on a follow-up website. Along with the use of the online EQA results tool, there has been an ongoing improvement in most of the quality of care indicators. CONCLUSIONS Creation of the EQA has proven to be useful for the measurement of the quality of care of primary care services. Also an improvement trend over 5 years is shown across most of the measured indicators. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/2193-1801-2-51) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.