The purpose of measuring outcomes is to enable and accelerate learning and improvement in health care delivery. If you find yourself asking, “Matters to whom?” the obvious answer is: what matters to patients. The reason for health care is to help patients and families.
Facts are friendly. While physicians may worry about what outcome measurement may reveal, the opportunity to learn and improve is enabled tremendously by measuring results. When you can identify successes and failures, as well as where outcomes succeed or fail by dimension, you gain critical insight about how to improve. Putting in place measurement, feedback, and learning processes enables one patient’s outcomes to inform treatment of the next patient with similar circumstances. Physicians who don’t track outcomes for their patients lack the feedback and tools to enable rapid learning and ongoing improvement. This points to a fundamental tenant of value-based health care: to get ever-better results for your patients and to do so efficiently.
To learn how better (or worse) outcomes are being achieved, you need to analyze the processes that lead to those outcomes. Process improvement methodology is widely used in most sectors of the economy, but less often in health care. When it is used in health care, it is often applied within departmental or procedural silos, rather than across the full cycle of the patient’s care journey. This fractured view of health care slows improvement and innovation; to really understand how desired outcomes may be achieved, processes must be viewed holistically.
