With more than 200 hospitals participating over 8 years, TOP 20 is totally consolidated in the Spanish health environment and is a highly valued and eagerly awaited programme for the hospitals themselves.

As well as the evaluation of global indicators of the participating hospitals, the clinical area that will be evaluated this year will be Stroke Care

Methodological changes

After two years classifying non-teaching hospitals depending on the management model they use, the growing stature of working regime hospitals over the whole country has meant that we have had to return to the hospital classification criteria used previously.

In addition, the surgical outpatients' indicator which has been used historically will also change (rate of CMA substitution). As we promised during the last edition, surgical outpatients will be assessed by an index which will relate actual outpatient activity with the expected performance of the outpatients unit, in accordance with the characteristics of each individual episode.

Change of operating procedure when sending the questionnaire

With the aim of improving the whole process of issuing and validating information provided, in this edition, the questionnaire will be filled in via the web. In this way, the participating hospitals will have a space online where they will have to fill in the information requested.

In their own web space, which will have full security guarantees and will be password protected, each hospital will be able to have access, as many times as needed, to add or change the information requested.

Also, the questionnaire will establish a set of alerts in real time which will make the validation process easier and will mitigate the usual administrative procedures.

To participate, the Hospital will have to send the following information:

• Participation Agreement signed, by fax (93 317 25 97) for the attention of Susana Muñoz.
• Once we have received the signed Agreement, we will send you an email with a website address and security codes to be able to access your private questionnaire area.
• MBDS and CMA Data from the year 2007 by e-mail to: iasist@iasist.com (Subject:"Name of Hospital" - TOP 20). If this data has already been sent to Iasist for other reasons, there is no need to send it again.