1. Background
There is increasing demand for better quality indicators in order for healthcare leaders and providers to benchmark standards of care and implement quality improvement strategies (Simms et al., 2012). However, one criticism of individual quality measures is that they may not reflect the overall quality of care by providers (Majeed et al., 2007). Improvement in scores on one quality measure may have the unintended consequence of decreasing quality scores on another measure. For example, changes in clinical practice to improve quality scores for hospital-acquired pressure ulcer rate could decrease the quality scores for fall rate due to the focus on hospital-acquired pressure ulcer prevention including increased or earlier mobilization of patients.
Health care quality composite indices are single measures that combine the strengths of two or more individual quality measures and provide easy-to-use indices for performance evaluations and comparisons. Simms et al. (2012) argue that composite indices provide a better comparison of provider performance than single indicators. For example, Dimick et al., (2009) combined two quality measures (observed mortality rate and hospital volume for each of six surgical operations) and found the composite to be a strong predictor of future performance. Our study objective was to develop an inpatient unit-level composite nursing care quality outcome performance indicator—the Pressure Ulcer and Fall Rate Quality Composite Index.