Quality indicators have been developed throughout Europe primarily for use in hospitals, but also increasingly for primary care. Both development and application are important but there has been less research on the application of indicators. Three issues are important when developing or applying indicators: (1) which stakeholder perspective(s) are the indicators intended to reflect; (2) what a...

BACKGROUND Clinical quality indicators are used to monitor the performance of healthcare services and should wherever possible be based on research evidence. Little is known however about the extent to which indicators in common use are based on research. The objective of this study is to measure the extent to which clinical quality indicators used in asthma management in children with outcome ...

OBJECTIVE To describe how quality of care is incorporated into performance-based financing (PBF) programs, what quality indicators are being used, and how these indicators are measured and verified. METHODS An exploratory scoping methodology was used to characterize the full range of quality components in 32 PBF programs, initiated between 2008 and 2015 in 28 low- and middle-income countries,...

BACKGROUND Quality assurance concerns about social media platforms used for education have arisen within the medical education community. As more trainees and clinicians use resources such as blogs and podcasts for learning, we aimed to identify quality indicators for these resources. A previous study identified 151 potentially relevant quality indicators for these social media resources. OBJ...

OBJECTIVES To identify a generic set of face valid quality indicators for primary care mental health services which reflect a multi-stakeholder perspective and can be used for facilitating quality improvement. DESIGN Modified two-round postal Delphi questionnaire. SETTING Geographical spread across Great Britain. PARTICIPANTS One hundred and fifteen panellists representing 11 different st...

The movement to measure medical care quality has been accelerating, spurred on by evidence of poor quality of care and trials of interventions to improve care. Appropriate measurement of quality of care is an essential aspect of improving the quality of care, yet some quality measures may be influenced by patients' attributes unrelated to quality of care. Risk adjustment is the term commonly ap...

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Quality of health care is a hot topic, especially with regard to cancer. Although rectal cancer is, in many aspects, a model oncologic entity, there seem to be substantial differences in quality of care between countries, hospitals and physicians. PROCARE, a Belgian multidisciplinary national project to improve outcome in all patients with rectum cancer, identified a set of quality of care indi...

OBJECTIVE To develop process-based quality indicators to improve perioperative care for elderly surgical patients. BACKGROUND The population is aging and expanding, and physicians must continue to optimize elderly surgical care to meet the anticipated increase in surgical services. We sought to develop process-based quality indicators applicable to virtually all disciplines of surgery to iden...

BACKGROUND The medical care chain around Down syndrome (DS) is complex, with many multidisciplinary challenges. The current quality of care is unknown. Outcome-oriented quality indicators have the potential to improve medical practice and evaluate whether innovations are successful. This is particularly interesting for the evolving care for people with DS and intellectual disabilities (ID). The...