Health Care Performance Measures: Too Much of a Good Thing?
<p>Is it possible there’s too much performance measurement going on in health care these days? According to The Commonwealth Fund’s David Blumenthal, M.D., and the Institute of Medicine’s J. Michael McGinnis, M.D., the proliferation of health care metrics, some of them imperfect, is “increasing the burden and blurring the ability to focus on issues most important to better health and health care.”</p><p>In a <em>JAMA</em> “Viewpoint” published online today, Blumenthal and McGinnis discuss the new Institute of Medicine (IOM) report <em>Vital Signs: Core Metrics for Health and Health Care Progress</em>, which identifies a set of measures that should be required at national, state, local, and institutional levels and recommends steps to implement and refine them.</p>
<p>The deliberately limited set of measures put forward by the IOM were “outcomes-oriented, reflective of system performance, meaningful, and had utility at multiple levels of the health care system,” the authors say.</p>
<p>Blumenthal, The Commonwealth Fund’s president, chaired the IOM Committee on Core Metrics for Better Health at Lower Cost, which produced the report.</p>