Systematic search and assessment of quality indicators in dental implantology.

Measuring quality in healthcare is essential to improve the best practices and optimizing the use of resources. Despite some Quality of Care (QoC) initiatives in other medical specialties, little is known about this topic in Dental Implantology (DI). The aim of this study was to identify and evaluate quality indicators (QIs) by performing an importance-performance analysis (IPA) for DI. Identification of QIs was done based on a systematic search. Importance was assessed by experts through an online survey and performance was evaluated with a monocenter, retrospective study. Finally, importance-perfomance plots were constructed to identify quality improvement targets with cut-offs for level of importance (>75 %) and performance (>80 %). A total of 12 QIs were selected varying between structure, process and outcome variables. 5 indicators met the cut-off levels indicating high levels of importance as well as performance. However, there is still a need for further research to validate these possible indicators and to evaluate their final effect on the QoC.