Quality Indicators for Hospital Care

Abstract

Hospital quality indicators are widely implemented for purposes such as accountability, transparency and the overarching aim of quality improvement. However, it is not clear whether currently used hospital quality indicators actually reflect quality of care.

The aim of this thesis was to expand our knowledge on how to measure quality of hospital care with the focus on external comparison. I specifically investigated reliability and validity as these are key aspects of quality indicators. For reliability we focused on data quality, indicator definitions and statistical uncertainty. For the validity we focused on case-mix correction.