[Assessment and certification of hospital care in Germany]

The increasing call for evaluating and certifying the quality of hospital care is to be seen in connection with the need for more transparency in the German health care system. Hospitals can have themselves evaluated or compared on four levels of quality: the level of medical, nursing, and organizational core services, the level of the quality system of the hospital, the level of the internal quality management, and the level of business excellence. The external comparisons of hospitals legally established in Germany deal with the evaluation of core services of hospitals. All the other levels are covered by holistic evaluation and certification procedures following the models of the EFQM and the ISO, the genuine medical certification systems (KTQ and JCI), or peer reviewing. Each of them has different objectives and all are applied in German acute care hospitals. However, their methods are not yet fully developed and certainly will have to be further optimized in view of the forthcoming changes in the German health care system.