[Benchmarking in health care: conclusions and recommendations].

The German Health Ministry funded 10 demonstration projects and accompanying research of benchmarking in health care. The accompanying research work aimed to infer generalisable findings and recommendations. We performed a meta-evaluation of the demonstration projects and analysed national and international approaches to benchmarking in health care. It was found that the typical benchmarking sequence is hardly ever realised. Most projects lack a detailed analysis of structures and processes of the best performers as a starting point for the process of learning from and adopting best practice. To tap the full potential of benchmarking in health care, participation in voluntary benchmarking projects should be promoted that have been demonstrated to follow all the typical steps of a benchmarking process.