Medical appropriateness of hospital utilization: an overview of the Swiss experience.

We present here the principal results of four concurrent hospital utilization reviews conducted in Switzerland in 1990 and 1991, based on an adapted Appropriateness Evaluation Protocol. The studies were performed on all the hospital days from a sample of patients admitted over a 6 month period. The level of inappropriate use ranged between 8 and 15% in terms of days and was consistently higher in medicine than in surgery. In comparison with other published studies, the low proportion of observed inappropriate days is probably due, at least partly, to differences in study design.