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Berlin Quality Management (QM) is well established in Germany’s medical, psychotherapeutic and dental practices, but not all QM instruments are used equally widely.

This is the result of the 2023 QM reports of the National Association of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians and Dentists (KBV and KZBV) published by the Federal Joint Committee (G-BA). Accordingly, there is still room for improvement when it comes to the use of error reporting and reporting systems.

The QM reports are based on a representative random sample of four percent of practices. For the KBV report, 4,168 practices nationwide were surveyed, of which 3,278 survey forms (2,940 medical/1,229 psychotherapeutic) were included in the evaluation.

Result: Well over 90 percent of practices define quality goals, define their processes and use further education and training. In addition, 97 percent of the practices surveyed have established error management. However, only 20 percent used a systematic error reporting and learning system such as CIRSmedical or Every Error Counts.

In these systems, all professional groups working in a practice can report errors anonymously and without penalty, which are then systematically evaluated for improvements. The patient survey instrument was used by 59 percent of practices in 2023.

There was also a significant increase in pain management: 55 percent instead of just 37 percent of practices with pain patients used it in the reporting period. © hil/sb/aerzteblatt.de