Development of standards and data quality control.

Health care expenses represent 6 to 10% of the Gross National Product in most European countries. This budget exceeds by far those devoted to Defence or Education. The rising cost of health care concerns all governments. In each country of the European Community, measures were and will further be taken in order to increase efficiency in the delivery of health care. Recent advances in information technology offer new opportunities to collect, process and exchange data to document health practices. In Belgium the Ministry of Public Health collects uniform medical summaries for all acute care hospital inpatients, while detailed health care activities are documented for each patient through a very precise billing system. The use of Minimal Clinical Data and Minimal Nursing Data Sets in hospitals became mandatory four years ago. The fundaments for any data collection is reliability, no matter what the preconceived aim was.