Keyes M A
J Healthc Qual. 2000 May-Jun;22(3):29-36. doi: 10.1111/j.1945-1474.2000.tb00125.x.
Variations in quality of healthcare have existed for many years, yet interest in measuring, understanding, and eliminating these variations has waxed and waned. The advent of managed care and its perceived focus on reducing costs has stimulated interest in variations in quality of care. In response to the need to better understand and measure quality, the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research (AHCPR) funded the development of a tool capable of categorizing clinical performance measures, a subset of quality measures, for comparing and evaluating them relative to a user's specific needs for measuring and improving quality. This research lead to the development of the COmputerized Needs-oriented QUality measurement Evaluation SysTem (CONQUEST)--a free software quality improvement tool that includes about 1,200 clinical performance measures. CONQUEST enables users to quickly identify measures of interest, compare them on the basis of factors of importance, and select measures that will help them measure and improve care.
医疗保健质量的差异已经存在多年，但对衡量、理解和消除这些差异的兴趣却有起有落。管理式医疗的出现及其对降低成本的关注激发了人们对医疗质量差异的兴趣。为了满足更好地理解和衡量质量的需求，医疗保健政策与研究机构（AHCPR）资助开发了一种工具，该工具能够对临床绩效指标（质量指标的一个子集）进行分类，以便根据用户衡量和提高质量的特定需求对其进行比较和评估。这项研究促成了面向需求的计算机化质量测量评估系统（CONQUEST）的开发——这是一个免费的软件质量改进工具，包含约1200项临床绩效指标。CONQUEST能让用户快速识别感兴趣的指标，根据重要因素对它们进行比较，并选择有助于他们衡量和改善医疗的指标。
