Endocrine Abstracts

Benchmarking is an approach for implementing best practices and involves comparing indicators of practice amongst centres. A key feature includes its integration within a continuous and participatory policy of continuous care quality improvement (CQI). Benchmarking in healthcare improves efficiency, quality of care, patient safety and patient satisfaction. The process involves identification of a point of comparison to compare indicators of practice, development of standards, sharing of best practice and identifying potential areas for improvement. In the context of congenital adrenal hyperplasia (CAH), benchmarking may focus on gathering indicators for long-term monitoring or outcome (e.g. anthropometric measures, psychosocial outcomes) or facilitate a comparison of morbidity outcomes (e.g. the incidence of acute adrenal insufficiency related adverse events including sick day episodes, adrenal crises and hospitalisations). The objective is to identify quality indicators that are relevant, valid and may be used to distinguish good from suboptimal quality of care. Studies using real world data from the I-CAH registry have provided an opportunity to collect this information, providing collaborating centres with a perspective on their clinical care outcomes compared to other centres via centre-specific benchmarking reports which the majority of centres have found beneficial. Understanding the reasons for variation in CAH care and identification of care deficits may enable targeting of resources resulting in overall improvement in patient care over time. This lecture will provide an overview of the developments in this area and describe the challenges for developing quality indicators and benchmarking in CAH.