Friday, March 07, 2014

The impact of externally applied “quality” measures

Note the quotation marks. The various performance measures that pass for quality in today's health policy groupthink have little to do with real quality. I've been saying that for several years, pointing to unintended consequences and lack of demonstrable benefit.

This was the topic of a recent review in the open access Journal of the American Heart Association. If focuses on cardiovascular disease but has a lot to say about the performance movement in general. It traces the history of performance metrics and their various iterations (public reporting, P4P, value based purchasing, etc.) and asks whether they have had any meaningful impact. The short answer is no.

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