Influences of definition ambiguity on hospital performance indicator scores: examples from The Netherlands

Research objective: Reliable and unambiguously defined performance indicators are fundamental to objective and comparable measurements of hospitals’ quality of care. In two separate case studies (intensive care and breast cancer care), we investigated if differences in definition interpretation of performance indicators affected the indicator scores. Design : Information about possible definition interpretations was obtained by a short telephone survey and a Web survey. We quantified the interpretation differences using a patient-level dataset from a national clinical registry (Case I) and a h... Mehr ...