Methods of Assessing Response to Quality Improvement Strategies

The issue of patient mobility is of growing relevance to EU policy-makers along with the need to improve the quality and performance of healthcare.

Thus, the MARQuIS project aimed at combining both of these concerns. The project’s main objective was to identify and compare different quality improvement policies and strategies in healthcare systems across the EU Member States and then to consider their potential use when cross-border patients receive health services. This general goal was further fragmented into four specific actions:

1. 1. 1. 1. To identify, compare and assess the formal adoption by EU member states of different quality strategies at a national level (accreditation, certification, peer review, clinical guidelines, performance indicators, patient surveys, etc.)
         2. To identify and synthesize the quality requirements for cross-border patients as expressed by European regulation, jurisprudence, guidance and research, insurance contracts, and patients’ needs
         3. To describe in a sample of states how hospitals have applied national quality strategies to meet the defined requirements of cross-border patients and variables of organization and methodology associated with meeting them
         4. To use these data to draw conclusions about the association of various national quality strategies and compliance with defined requirements and the need for developing formal quality procedures at the EU level

MARQuIS was a three-year project launched in 2005 under the EU 6th Framework Programme for Research. It concluded in 2008.