Monitoring health‐care processes: a framework for performance indicators

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Abstract
Until recently, it was uncommon to ask professionals to give objective evidence to non-professionals regarding the quality of their work. Nowadays, however, professionals, their health-care processes and their health-care organisations have to face assessments concerning organisation, control and content of the work. Meanwhile, health-care organisations generate improvement programmes to mutually match activities of individual professionals and to redesign health-care processes within or between health-care organisations. In all these situations information is required on the current and sometimes the improved stage of the health-care process. Often performance indicators are mentioned to generate this information. In this paper we present a framework of performance indicators and related measuring instruments to monitor and evaluate health-care processes. It is based on a literature scan and on empirical research in two general hospitals and one mental hospital. The literature scan was guided by the three case studies and in the case studies the framework was tested.