[Evaluation of benchmarking networks in Germany: background and methodology]

Benchmarking as a tool of organisational development is directed towards improvement through learning from others. The German Ministry of Health funded 10 demonstration projects on clinical benchmarking in order to study the prerequisites to and the methods for its dissemination. The evaluation was carried out as an observational study in 2008. The evaluation tools used included a list of criteria to uniformly describe benchmarking networks and a scheme to categorize the realized benchmarking steps.