2.3. Questionnaire to healthcare experts A major purpose of the questionnaire survey was to select a limited number of indicators, which are applicable to hospital management in the Japanese context, from viewpoints of healthcare experts. The questionnaire comprised a main part of “usefulness” rating, and a series of open-ended questions related to specific indicators on hospital management. In the main part, respondents were asked to make “usefulness” rating for each indicator on a three-category scale, including two extremes. Expression of one extreme (positive) was “the indicator is of critical importance for hospital management”, while the other extreme (negative) was instructed in the following statement: “the indicator does not make sense for hospital management. It is just a waste of time to collect the data”. Therefore, the intermediate response option was not actually neutral, but somewhat between “slightly disagree”(slightly negative) and “slightly agree” (slightly positive) in the sense of a Likert type scale. The intention of using this response scale was to select only a small number of indicators to which a majority of healthcare experts acknowledge extremely high value, but no or very few have strong objection.