Box 2. Standards, criteria and attributes

Criteria and standards are “the tools by which the quality is measured” [2]. As such, they form the back-bone of many quality assurance approaches. However, there is no agreed-upon usage for these terms, and in fact, various contradictory definitions have been given [20]

Donabedian [2] defines a criterion as “an attribute of structure, process, or outcome that is used to draw an inference about quality. […] For example a criterion of outcome could be case fatality”. Standards are defined as “a specified quantitative measure of magnitude or frequency that specifies what is good or less so. […] For example a standard for case fatality could be: no more than 0.1% for a specified procedure (or a set of procedures) in a specified category of patients

Quality attributes according to Donabedian [2] are the “product characteristics [which] taken singly of in a variety of combinations constitute a definition of quality and, when measured in one way or another will signify its magnitude”. According to this definition data quality attributed in epidemiology refer to data quality framework dimensions such as relevance; accuracy; credibility; timeliness; accessibility; interpretability; and coherence [17]. These can either be attributes of the system that produced the data (i.e. the process) or of the data itself (data output/outcome) [21]

Donabedian also proposes a useful link between the standard-criteria duo and quality attributes: “Criteria and standards are vehicles by which quality attributes are translated to actual measurements”

Items in bold in this table and in the text can be traced back to this box as a reference