[Validity and reliability of a synthetic hospital health care quality indicator]

Abstract

Objective: Benchmarking between different health organisations is a useful tool for improving quality, but it requires using valid and reliable indicators so that comparisons may be based on objective data. The aim of this work is to verify the validity and reliability of a synthetic hospital health care quality indicator.

Material and methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted over a five-year period on the Quality Plan indicators of 10 hospitals, under the model of the European Foundation of Quality Management (EFQM). Reliability was checked using the Cronbach's alpha coefficient. The validity was determined using a cluster analyses (dendrogram), examining relationships between different indicator results, and by means of an exploratory analysis of the correlations between the process indicators and results indicators proposed by the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ).

Results: An «acceptable» reliability was found (α=0.759). No clusters were found that corresponded to the set of criteria of the EFQM model, or any significant correlations with the results indicators.

Conclusions: It is proposed to continue devising indicators that could empirically be shown to be valid in order to be incorporated into synthetic indicators, in such a way that the efficiency of health care management in all hospitals may be compared.