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Showing posts from October, 2010

Measurement of Hard Outcomes Trumps Process Measurement (Again)

Researchers this week cast doubt on the wisdom of looking first at processes and operations to drive quality improvement and urged Medicare, which provides health insurance to people 65 and older, to focus on “hard” outcomes such as rates of surgical deaths and serious complications. In a study published this Monday in Archives of Surgery , a medical journal, and reported this Tuesday by the Wall Street Journal (Thomas M. Burton, “Medicare Faulted on Surgery Evaluation,” October 19, 2010, A6), researchers at the University of Michigan said a better way to lower rates of death and serious complications is to focus on actual outcomes like death rates and to publicize those  rates for all hospitals. This focus on actual outcomes is something my colleagues and I have been advocating for courts since the promulgation of the Trial Court Performance Standards twenty years ago and continue to do so with the CourTools and the Appellate CourTools . (See one of the first few postings here, &q