Purpose: Patient specific quality assurance (PSQA) is required to verify the treatment delivery and the dose calculation by the treatment planning system (TPS). The objective of this work is to demonstrate the feasibility to substitute resource consuming measurement based PSQA (PSQA(M)) by independent dose recalculations (PSQA(IDC)), and that PSQA(IDC) results may be interpreted in a clinically relevant manner using normal tissue complication probability (NTCP) and tumor control probability (TCP) models.Methods and materials: A platform for the automatic execution of the two following PSQA(IDC) workflows was implemented: (i) using the TPS generated plan and (ii) using treatment delivery log files (log-plan). 30 head and neck cancer (HNC) patients were retrospectively investigated. PSQA(M) results were compared with those from the two PSQA(IDC) workflows. TCP/NTCP variations between PSQA(IDC) and the initial TPS dose distributions were investigated. Additionally, for two example patients that showed low passing PSQA(M) results, eight error scenarios were simulated and verified via measurements and log-plan based calculations. For all error scenarios Delta TCP/NTCP values between the nominal and the log-plan dose were assessed.Results: Results of PSQA(M) and PSQA(IDC) from both implemented workflows agree within 2.7% in terms of gamma pass ratios. The verification of simulated error scenarios shows comparable trends between PSQA(M) and PSQA(IDC). Based on the 30 investigated HNC patients, PSQA(IDC) observed dose deviations translate into a minor variation in NTCP values. As expected, TCP is critically related to observed dose deviations.Conclusions: We demonstrated a feasibility to substitute PSQA(M) with PSQA(IDC). In addition, we showed that PSQA(IDC) results can be interpreted in clinically more relevant manner, for instance using TCP/NTCP. (C) 2020 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier B.V. Radiotherapy and Oncology 150 (2020) 136-141 This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).