Quality assessment. An emerging component of hospital epidemiology.

Amid the national preoccupation for monitoring health care and health care providers, it is argued that quality assurance is basically an epidemiological pursuit. The study of the distribution and determinants of desirable health care--quality assurance--is best illustrated by the efforts of those who have worked to prevent and control the untoward outcomes associated with hospital-acquired infections. As such, infection control is the paradigm for quality assurance, and hospital epidemiology is the discipline best suited to deal with continual need for providing information for health care decisionmakers.