Excellent quality in the treatment and care of our patients and patient safety are top priorities at the DHZC.

Quality Management (QM) at the DHZC contributes to improving the quality of services and care on a daily basis through the conceptual design, control and further development of our quality management system at the DHZC.

Quality Management is involved in the planning, initiation, coordination and evaluation of internal QM projects, such as the development and implementation of quality indicators, projects on indication quality and the cross-clinic harmonisation of standards and procedural instructions.

Our claim: We treat, care and research with the aim of becoming even better every day.

In order to live up to this claim, we regularly analyse our actions:

• We use the results of our ongoing patient satisfaction survey as well as suggestions, praise and criticism, which can reach us in person, by e-mail, by post, by telephone or via a feedback form (feedback).
• Together with Charité, we operate an error management system (Critical Incident Reporting System) in which our employees can report near-misses and critical incidents anonymously and without sanctions. We use these reports to further develop our safety culture, identify sources of error and continuously optimise our processes and structures.
• The clinics involved in the DHZC regularly organise interdisciplinary and in some cases multi-professional morbidity and mortality conferences. We utilise the knowledge gained from these conferences to continuously improve and develop ourselves further.

Our high quality standard is reflected in the large number of certificates that the various clinics involved in the DHZC can show as evidence of their high structural and process quality.

The DHZC is one of 60 clinics from six European countries taking part in the ‘Magnet4Europe ’ project and is aiming for certification as a Magnet® hospital. The Magnet® certificate of the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC) is a certificate that is particularly widespread in the Anglo-American region and recognises hospitals with a particularly high quality of care. The DHZC's multi-professional, interdisciplinary project teams develop a wide range of quality improvement projects as part of the preparations for certification.

Quality assurance at the DHZC

The systematic collection of data to assess the quality of treatment has a long tradition in cardiac medicine. The DHZC participates in the mandatory, cross-institutional quality assurance measures in accordance with §136ff SGB V. The patient data collected for this purpose is analysed by the Institute for Quality Assurance and Transparency in Healthcare (IQTIG) and the results are transmitted to the hospitals.

The aim of mandatory participation, reflection of the evaluation results and publication is to ensure and improve the quality of treatment throughout Germany and to increase patient safety.

In addition to an overview of the structures and services of the hospitals, these results are published in the hospitals' structured quality report for all to see. The DHZC data will be published with the Charité's overall report, starting with the 2023 quality report. Archived quality reports of the DHZC partners can be found further down on this page.

The Deutsches Herzzentrum der Charité also participates in voluntary transparency-promoting quality assurance procedures as well as national and international registers (e.g. the German Aortic Valve Register or EUROMACS). The DHZC publishes its results with the data of the entire Charité in the Quality Medicine Initiative (IQM) or in the Quality Assurance with Routine Data (QSR) procedure of the Scientific Institute of the AOK (WIdO).

Further information

If you have any questions about Quality Management and Quality Assurance at the DHZC, you can contact us via the functional email address qm-qs-dhzc@dhzc-charite.de. We will be happy to get back to you.