• Saeid Shahraz, Sarvenaz Shahin, Yosef Farzi, Mitra Modirian, Nazila Shahbal, Mehrdad Azmin, Farnam Mohebi, Mohammadreza Naderian, Masoume Amin-Esmaeili, Naser Ahmadi, Shahedeh Seyfi, Hossein Zokaei, Roya Samadi, Bahram Mohajer, Roya Sherafat-Kazemzadeh, Abbas Balouchi, Bita Mesgarpour, Mahboubeh Parsaeian, Fatemeh Gorgani, Saral Rahimi, Sahar Saeedi Moghadam, Maryam Khezrian, Ahmad Amin, Shahab Baheshmat, Mohammad Reza Beyranvand, Majid Haghjoo, Mitra Mahdavi-Mazdeh, Masoud Mehrpour, Ghobad Moradi, Soheil Peiman, Besharat Rahimi, Afarin Rahimi-Movaghar, Reza Rikhtegar, Shahin Roshani, Mohammad Saadatnia, Seyed Mehdi Samimi Ardestani, and Shahab Khatibzadeh.
• Tufts Medical Center, Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies, Boston, Massachusetts, USA.
• Arch Iran Med. 2023 Mar 1; 26 (3): 126137126-137.

BackgroundAssessment of quality and cost of medical care has become a core health policy concern. We conducted a nationwide survey to assess these measures in Iran as a developing country. To present the protocol for the Iran Quality of Care in Medicine Program (IQCAMP) study, which estimates the quality, cost, and utilization of health services for seven diseases in Iran.MethodsWe selected eight provinces for this nationally representative short longitudinal survey. Interviewers from each province were trained comprehensively. The standard definition of seven high-burden conditions (acute myocardial infarction [MI], heart failure [HF], diabetes mellitus [DM], stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary (COPD) disease, major depression, and end-stage renal disease [ESRD]) helped customize a protocol for disease identification. With a 3-month follow-up window, the participants answered pre-specified questions four times. The expert panels developed a questionnaire in four modules (demographics, health status, utilization, cost, and quality). The expert panel chose an inclusive set of quality indicators from the current literature for each condition. The design team specified the necessary elements in the survey to calculate the cost of care for each condition. The utilization assessment included various services, including hospital admissions, outpatient visits, and medication.ResultsTotally, 156 specialists and 78 trained nurses assisted with patient identification, recruitment, and interviewing. A total of 1666 patients participated in the study, and 1291 patients completed all four visits.ConclusionThe IQCAMP study was the first healthcare utilization, cost, and quality survey in Iran with a longitudinal data collection to represent the pattern, quantity, and quality of medical care provided for high-burden conditions.© 2023 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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