Getting More Performance from Performance Measurement

Under today's performance-measurement paradigm, too many resources are invested in assessing too many activities that may not have major effects on patients' health. What can past successes and failures teach us about performance measures that effectively improve care? Just a few decades ago, there was little effort to measure the performance of the health care system — indeed, most aspects of health care quality were considered unmeasurable. The situation started to change as research revealed wide variability in the safety and quality of health care and as measurement was increasingly recognized as an important tool for improving quality. Today, health care providers and payers spend substantial resources collecting, analyzing, and reporting data on providers' performance. Given the investment and stakes involved, we need to ensure that we get the most improvement possible out of these efforts. The current . . .