Quality

value = quality/cost

Prolonged length of stay (pLOS), disease-related complications, and 30-day readmissions are important quality metrics under the Affordable Care Act.

see ACS National Surgical Quality Improvement Program.

The Grading of Recommendations Assessment Development and Evaluation (short GRADE) working group began in the year 2000 as an informal collaboration of people with an interest in addressing the shortcomings of grading systems in health care. The working group has developed a common, sensible and transparent approach to grading quality (or certainty) of evidence and strength of recommendations. Many international organizations have provided input into the development of the GRADE approach which is now considered the standard in guideline development.

Public and private insurers want to add quality into the payment calculation, rather than paying for quantity only.

Quality care can be defined as a process that achieves predefined goals without significant error and maintains or improves health ¹⁾.

Quality and safety are basic concerns in any medical practice. Especially in daily surgical practice, with increasing turnover and shortened procedure times, attention to these topics needs to be assured.

In order to deliver to our patients the best quality of care, a certain level of proficiency and competence needs to be attained and maintained. This is true for all areas of neurosurgery and constitutes a realistic objective in the treatment of most pathologies.

Quality assurance.

see Quality of care.

Methodological quality refers to the level of rigor and validity in the design, implementation, and analysis of a research study. In other words, it refers to how well a study has been conducted and how confident we can be in its findings.

Some factors that can affect methodological quality include the sampling method, data collection techniques, the use of appropriate measures and statistical analyses, the control of confounding variables, and the reporting of results. A study with high methodological quality is more likely to produce reliable and accurate results and to be considered trustworthy by other researchers and the scientific community.

Quality indicator.

see Quality improvement.

External validation

Quality and Safety in Neurosurgery