Quality indicators for National Disease Management Guidelines using the example of the National Disease Management Guideline for Chronic Heart Failure''

Together with an expert committee a structured approach to determining quality indicators for National Disease Management Guidelines has been developed. The key steps of this approach include: introducing guideline authors to the methodology at an early stage of the process of guideline development, pre-selecting recommendations of the guideline which are potentially measurable by means of quality indicators, assessing the potentially measurable quality indicators in written form using five criteria (including their importance for the health care system and clarity of definitions) and approving them in a formal consensus process. For lack of a database these quality indicators must be regarded as preliminary. For the National Disease Management Guideline Chronic Heart Failure'' nine rate-based indicators have been chosen. The indicators correspond to important strong recommendations (grade of recommendation: A) from the fields of diagnosis (two), general therapeutic strategy (two), specific treatment (three), clinical monitoring (one) and co-ordination of care (one). In a second step, the quality indicators have to be validated within a pilot project. The determination and assessment of the potential quality indicators have revealed room for improvement of guideline development. In particular, there is a need for more health care data and for specification of recommendations.