[Developing Quality Indicators: Background, Methods and Problems]

Quality indicators (QIs) are used in many areas of health care in order to measure, compare, and improve quality. QIs are specific, measurable aspects of care that can be used to assess its quality. Assessing the quality of care contributes to quality improvement. Amongst other applications, QIs are used in quality management for comparisons between providers and in pay-for-performance systems. QIs can be developed on the basis of expert opinion, scientific evidence or clinical practice guidelines. For the efficient development of high quality QIs, rigorous, approved, and evidence-based development methods are needed. At present, there is no gold standard for the development of QIs.