Commentary: applying hospital quality indicators to clinical practice

Hospitals use various methods to establish performance benchmarks. This may include cooperative data shared between organizations to allow broad, general comparisons. These can, however, be misinterpreted as representing standards of patient care. In the authors' institution, a more complete examination was made of one of these quality indicators when it appeared quality indicator standards were in conflict with standards of patient care. The authors conclude that quality indicators are valuable when screening a hospital, just as we utilize screening tests to identify patients at potential risk. Neither should we apply broad quality indicators as standards of care without a full understanding of their strengths and weaknesses and the foundation on which they are built.