Health services research
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Health services research · Apr 2001
Comparative StudyComparison of indicators assessing the quality of drug prescribing for asthma.
To compare different indicators for assessing the quality of drug prescribing and establish their agreement in identifying doctors who may not adhere to treatment guidelines. ⋯ Indicators based on self-report instruments seem to overestimate guideline adherence. Indicators assessing prescribing quality at an aggregated level give clearly different results, as compared to indicators evaluating prescribing data on an individual patient level. Caution is needed when using such prescribing indicators to identify low adherence to guidelines. Further validation studies using a gold standard comparison are needed to define the best possible indicator.