Quality Metrics in Inpatient Neurology

Quality of care in the context of inpatient neurology is the standard of performance by neurologists and the hospital system as measured against ideal models of care. There are growing regulatory pressures to define health care value through concrete quantifiable metrics linked to reimbursement. Theoretical models of quality acknowledge its multimodal character with quantitative and qualitative dimensions. For example, the Donabedian model distils quality as a phenomenon of three interconnected domains, structure-process-outcome, with each domain mutually influential. The actual measurement of quality may be implicit, as in peer review in morbidity and mortality rounds, or explicit, in which criteria are prespecified and systemized before assessment. As a practical contribution, in this article a set of candidate quality indicators for inpatient neurology based on an updated review of treatment guidelines is proposed. These quality indicators may serve as an initial blueprint for explicit quality metrics long overdue for inpatient neurology.