Quality of ambulatory care for the elderly: formulating evaluation criteria.

Efforts to assess the quality of ambulatory care services provided to Medicare beneficiaries cannot meaningfully proceed unless a concerted effort is made to develop criteria and standards for ambulatory care quality assessment that reflect the specific characteristics and needs of the elderly. In this article, we describe some of those characteristics and needs--such as physical and mental impairments and multiple coexisting conditions--and we show how they affect the care provided to the elderly and, therefore, the proper assessment of that care. We also outline an approach for the orderly development of the requisite criteria and standards.