Hospital Performance Evaluation Checklist in Context of COVID-19 Pandemic: Design and Validation.

Objective: Around the world, pandemics have been considered among the main hazards in the last 2 decades. Hospitals are 1 of the most important organizations responding to pandemics. The aim of this study was to design and develop a valid checklist for evaluating the hospitals' performance in response to COVID-19 pandemic, for the first time.

Methods: This study is a mixed method research design that began in February, 2020 and was conducted in 3 phases: Designing a conceptual model, designing a primary checklist structure, and checklist psychometric evaluation. Known-groups method has been used to evaluate construct validity. Two groups of hospitals were compared: group A (COVID-19 Hospitals) and group B (the other hospitals).

Results: The checklist's main structure was designed with 6 main domains, 23 sub-domains, and 152 items. The content validity ratio and index were 0.94 and 0.79 respectively. Eleven items were added, 106 items were removed, and 40 items were edited. Independent t-test showed a significant difference between the scores of the 2 groups of hospitals ( < 0.0001). Pearson correlation coefficient test also showed a high correlation between our checklist and the other. The internal consistency of the checklist was 0.98 according to Cronbach's alpha test.

Conclusions: Evaluating the hospitals' performance and identifying their strengths and weaknesses, can help health system policymakers and hospital managers, and leads to improved performance in response to COVID-19.