  The paper discusses empirical Bayes methodology for repeated quality
comparisons of health care institutions using data from the Dutch VOKS study
that annually monitors the relative performance and quality of nearly all Dutch
gynecological centres with respect to different aspects of the childbirths
taking place in these centres. This paper can be seen as an extension of the
pioneering work of Thomas, Longford and Rolph and Goldstein and Spiegelhalter.
First of all, this paper introduces a new simple crude estimate of the centre
effect in a logistic regression setting. Next, a simple estimate of the
expected percentile of a centre given all data and a measure of rankability of
the centres based on the expected percentiles are presented. Finally, the
temporal dimension is explored and methods are discussed to predict next years
performance.
