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.