Essential reading from the editor’s desk

Abstract

Quality measures are becoming increasingly important in clinical practice, not only as a monitoring tool in the hospital for internal quality purposes but more and more also in communication with the general community as publicly available indicators of quality (1-3). Especially for technical subspecialties such as endoscopy, it is key that outcome and complications are closely monitored. This is also reflected in a multitude of quality initiatives of national and international endoscopy societies (4). In the current edition of the Acta, Moreels and colleagues evaluated the accuracy of self-reported adverse events by the endoscopists by comparing it to a retrospective analysis of the medical records (5). The total adverse events rate was 1.95% with only half of the events being voluntarily reported by the endoscopist. Even if 2/3 of the unreported events were mild, this important study still highlights that the current reporting methods are flawed and a more user-friendly ad-hoc registration system, integrated in the electronic medical records, should be developed.