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December 14, 2005
Journal of the American
Medical Association
The Long Road to
Patient Safety: 
A Status Report on
Patient Safety Systems.

..............................................
December 1, 2005
Office of News and
Public Information

National System
Needed to Measure
and Report on Health
Care Performance;
New Board Should
Be Created to Guide Development.
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August 21, 2005
NY TIMES

It's the Simple
Things But Hospitals
Don't Do Them.
 
 
 

December 1, 2005  I  FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

National System Needed to Measure and Report on Health Care Performance;
New Board Should Be Created to Guide Development


The National Academies: Advisers to the Nation on Science, Engineering, and Medicine
Contacts: Christine Stencel, Media Relations Officer; Chris Dobbins, Media Relations Assistant
Office of News and Public Information; Phone: 202-334-2138; E-mail <news@nas.edu>


WASHINGTON -- If pay-for-performance initiatives and public reporting systems are to be effective in improving the
quality of health care in the United States, a comprehensive, universally accepted system is needed to measure and report on the performance of health care providers and organizations, says a new report from the Institute of Medicine
of the National Academies. Congress should establish a new board within the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to coordinate the development of standardized performance measures and monitor the nation's progress
toward improving the health care system, said the committee that wrote the congressionally mandated report.

"Performance measures are a fundamental building block for all quality improvement initiatives," said committee
chair Steven Schroeder, professor of health and health care, University of California, San Francisco. "One of the
biggest obstacles to overcoming shortfalls in the quality of health care is the absence of a coherent, national system
for assessing and reporting on the performance of providers and organizations. Leadership at the federal level is necessary to ensure that the effort to develop performance measures achieves overarching national goals for health
care improvement."

Improving quality of care has become a top priority for all stakeholders in the health care system. Performance
measures are benchmarks by which health care providers and organizations can determine their success in delivering care – for example, regular blood and urine tests for diabetic patients, a facility's 30-day survival rate among cardiac bypass patients, or perceptions of care collected from patient surveys.

Many individual public and private organizations – including health plans, professional organizations, and
consumer advocates – have made substantial progress developing measures that cover important areas of clinical
care, organizational performance, and patients' perceptions of care. But these independent initiatives have led to duplication in some areas and neglect in others that are important to national health goals, the committee noted. Individual stakeholders understandably focus on certain features of care that they consider to be the highest priority
for improvement. But they frequently overlook areas of national interest that are difficult to quantify, such as whether
care is equitable, efficient, and well-coordinated.

The new National Quality Coordination Board recommended by the committee should guide and organize efforts to
build upon existing initiatives to develop performance measures. As an initial step toward achieving a universally accepted set of measures, the report recommends the immediate adoption of an evidence-based starter set of existing measures that would cover care delivered in ambulatory, acute care, and long-term care settings and in dialysis centers. The board should also guide the development of performance measures for areas that currently lack them, such as efficiency, equity, and patient-centered care.