[Quality assurance by introduction of internal medicine guidelines. What Can we learn by comparing various clinics?].

It is the objective of guideline controlled quality assurance to transfer the best knowledge (evidence based medicine) into clinical practice. The best approach to make these guidelines effective is to involve the potential users (doctors/nurses) in local guideline development. An own study of benchmarking "laparoscopic gallbladder surgery" in 9 hospitals could demonstrate the enormous potential of increasing effectiveness and efficiency by guideline application, since the hospital costs differed double the price with the same result. Internal guidelines help to improve the results and reduce costs.