nationally comparable data on health outcomes and mortality amenable to health care are needed to highlight differences across socioeconomic and geographical crosssections of the swiss population information on the quality of care delivered by health service providers is too often limited to acute care and only available through local or cantonallevel initiatives switzerland remains largely dependent on individual clinicians to keep up with best practice themselves and has only limited capacity to benchmark the quality of health care services across the country while consumers have significant choice between multiple health care providers they often have surprisingly little information on quality to inform their choices