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1. Clinical risk and quality management

In terms of healthcare policy, 2015 was marked by a quality offensive. The German legislature is planning to reward the quality of inpatient medical services while penalising poor quality at other facilities. For that purpose, the new Institute for Quality and Efficiency in the Healthcare System (Institut für Qualitätssicherung und Transparenz im Gesundheitswesen, IQTIG) will develop binding quality indicators so that the services of German hospitals can be measured and represented. Components of the remuneration are to be based on the quality delivered (pay-for-performance method). Also, hospital planning (e.g. licensing) of the facilities is to be dependent on the level of quality in the services they provide. Until this is implemented in the coming years, the hospitals will be preparing themselves for these new framework conditions.

RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG has met this challenge through, among other things, its hospitals having joined the Initiative Quality Medicine (IQM). Along with the Internet portal Qualitätskliniken.de, whose founding shareholders include our Company, IQM represents a further major quality initiative by German hospitals. We are the first hospital group to actively participate in both initiatives. Both initiatives between them represent some 500 German hospitals and have joined together to establish the foundation Stiftung Initiative Qualitätskliniken (SIQ!). SIQ! is an important driving force in the current debate on quality, and through its management is involved in the important conferences.

Within the Group division Medical Care, the further development of quality management has been the main focus of interest. For coordinated cooperation of the quality management officers from the Group division as well as from the Group’s facilities, semi-annual meetings were set up within the context of a separate panel of experts that were also attended by the heads of the respective medical controlling departments. This interdisciplinary cooperation was especially important since quality indicators are increasingly being generated on the basis of routine data, meaning that the content of the coding is becoming ever more important also in terms of quality aspects.

The results of the quality initiatives IQM and Qualitätskliniken.de as well as of the quality assurance and the quality survey conducted by the statutory health insurance fund AOK were the focus of interest of the centralised quality management department of the Group division Medical Care and were communicated within the corporate bodies of RHÖN-KLINIKUM AG. On this basis, we are implementing regular reporting on quality (Quality Cockpit) in 2016.