Quality assurance in psychiatric care--the example of routine use of the AMDP system

Quality assurance and continuous monitoring of the quality of delivered care in mental health are going to become a topic of increasing importance. There are several reasons for this process, including increased costs for medical treatment, enhanced possibilities of comparing treatment and outcome success by reimbursement agencies, but also evidence from clinical and epidemiological research of differences in clinical practice that cannot be explained by the current state of psychiatric knowledge. The definition of standards of care and of criteria to indicate the quality of delivered care is a topic of current debate. It is shown that indicators for continuous quality assurance monitoring can be derived from systematized routine psychiatric documentation of patients as in the AMDP system, although this system does not provide comprehensive information to cover the full range of indicators necessary to establish sufficient control for quality of care. Future developments are discussed.