Unpacking quality indicators: how much do they reflect differences in the quality of care?

Just over 50 years ago, Avedis Donabedian published his seminal paper, which sought to define and specify the 'quality of health care', articulating the now paradigmatic triad of structure, process and outcome for measuring healthcare quality.1 In recent years, we have seen the rapid expansion of increasingly inexpensive information technology capability and capacity, facilitating the collection and analysis of large healthcare data sets. These technological advances fuel the current proliferation of performance measurement in healthcare.2 Increasingly, in an effort to improve care, many cancer health systems, including those in England,3 the USA4 and Canada,5 6 are publicly reporting performance indicators, generally derived from these large data sets. Not surprisingly, differences in prevention, early detection and/or treatment of cancer are often used to explain the observed differences in performance across jurisdictions.6–9

Given the...

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