[Quality medicine initiative in urology].

To ensure that high quality, individualized treatment is systematically guaranteed, instruments and mechanisms, which are associated with an increasing number of interwoven processes and interfaces, are increasingly required in complex clinical routine. The main task of internal quality management is to optimize and standardize clinical processes and procedures in order to ensure quality of care. However, external assessment of these processes is also an important part of quality assurance. One of these external assessments can be carried out via the quality medicine initiative (Initiative Qualitätsmedizin). It provides a platform through which participating hospitals can continuously improve quality of care through three mechanisms: assessment of treatment quality using routine data, the transparency of this data, and use of an external peer review process.