Measuring Conformance to Treatment Guidelines: The Example of the Schizophrenia PORT

The use of adherence to guidelines to measure quality of care has emerged as a major tool in the quality management arsenal. This toolkit has been developed to illustrate how to design a measurement strategy around a set of guidelines as a means of assessing how well an organization is actually implementing those guidelines. This toolkit is not a guide to the treatment of schizophrenia. A major reason is the PORT guidelines, as described in this Toolkit, may have been subsequently updated since the toolkit was compiled. Nevertheless, the PORT process described serves to illustrate how one might begin to build a guideline-based quality assessment system. A secondary purpose of this toolkit is to illustrate how evaluation evidence can be used to develop guidelines for specific disorders. The PORT Tools for assessing care (the PORT Mental Health Survey, and the Schizophrenia PORT Inpatient and Outpatient Record Review forms) are included in the toolkit.