To collect internationally comparable data reflecting the health outcomes and health improvements attributable to medical care delivered in OECD countries.
The Health Care Quality Indicators Project (HCQI) responds to the growing interest by healthcare policymakers and researchers in OECD countries in measuring and reporting the quality of medical care. 'Quality indicators', here, means: indicators for the technical quality with which medical care is provided, i.e. measures of health outcome or health improvement attributable to medical care (changes in health status attributable to preventive or curative activity). Such measures could be said to represent the 'value' side of the 'value for money' equation in health care - a key issue in measuring the performance of health systems.
Many OECD countries have already instituted national strategies to begin to collect technical quality indicators often for benchmarking purposes in a performance measurement setting. Those efforts have brought about much progress in implementing quality indicators at the level of providers, such as hospitals or physicians. However, these national activities do not lead, except by accident, to internationally comparable QIs. That is because there is a lack of international agreement on the most promising indicators and many definitions of each indicator that could be adopted. Hence, there is, so far, little possibility of international benchmarking of quality of health care. This deprives national policymakers of the opportunity to compare the performance of their health care delivery systems against a peer group. An aim of the project is to begin to fill a gap in OECD Health Data.
HCQI builds on the efforts of several OECD countries and two international collaborations in developing indicators of health care quality at the national level. One group of five has been called together by an American foundation, the Commonwealth Fund of New York and represents Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. Another group of countries represents the five Nordic countries, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. The members of both groups and fourteen additional OECD countries have accepted the invitation to embark on the first steps towards a comprehensive reporting system for quality of care in OECD Member countries, bringing the total number of participants to 24 countries.
During 2004 the project was in the process of collecting preliminary data, and examining its international comparability, for an initial set of 17 indicators. It is hoped that a research report will be published in 2005.
In October 2004, 5 technical papers were released containing the recommendations of 5 Expert Panels, respectively, on additional indicators in 5 priority areas. The Panels made recommendations for health care quality indicators in the areas of:
The focus of the HCQI project is to develop national-level indicators for the technical quality with which medical care is provided. Other important dimensions of health system performance, such as responsiveness to patient needs and equity, have so far been addressed under different components of the OECD Health Project.
The HCQI project will follow a two-stage process. The first stage will be an attempt to build on the existing international collaborations and to extend the indicators proposed to other countries. The second stage will assess the gaps left in those indicator sets and will try to fill them. These two steps will be accomplished with the help of a series of collaborative meetings of experts from the 24 participating OECD countries.
The most comprehensive source of comparable statistics on health and health systems across OECD countries
This 4th edition of Health at a Glance provides the latest comparable data on the performance of health systems in OECD countries
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