Prescribing patterns as a quality measure for hypertension treatment in Portugal

Monitoring medical practice has become a major area of intervention for quality assurance programs in modern health systems. Among various methods of measuring quality in health, drug prescribing is one of the most important metrics. Prescribing patterns give access to important information such as patient adherence to therapy (for example for highly complex regimens), financial burdens for the system and for patients, identification of equally effective and safe but cheaper alternative options, and detection of variations in care practices. Variation in clinical practice -different clinical approaches (diagnostic tests, treatment choices, etc.) to the same type of patients with the same baseline risks -is difficult to overcome everywhere. In Portugal, OECD data show large differences across the country in various healthcare activities and procedures, for example in hospital medical admissions, cardiac catheterization rates, and age-standardized rates of knee replacement and Cesarean section.