The use of on-site visits to assess compliance and implementation of quality management at hospital level

"In a more and more market-oriented health-care delivery system it may be increasingly important to evaluate the quality of care delivered. To this end, health-care purchasers are gathering and using performance information on patient experiences as well as organizational and clinical performance indicators. 

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Despite years of efforts to improve the reliability and validity of performance indicators, there are still differences in outcomes related to registration and measurement error in the administrative databases used to calculate outcome indicators. Additional information about quality management and clinical quality strategies could be a valuable adjunct to hospital assessment, especially since accreditation/certification instruments that can be used to assess quality management systems already exist [1].

In this article the authors describe the development of two novel quality management indices for purchasers and other stakeholders of European hospitals. Both are developed within the DUQuE project (Deepening our understanding of Quality Improvement in Europe). One (the Quality Management Compliance Index or QMCI) focuses on compliance with existing quality management procedures at the hospital level and the other (the Clinical Quality Implementation Index or CQII) on activities that support continuous improvement of clinical indicators. This paper describes testing of the psychometric properties of the two newly developed measurement instruments (QMCI and CQII)".