The changing nature of today's health care organizations, including pressure to reduce costs, improve the quality of care and meet stringent guidelines, has forced health care professionals to re-examine how they evaluate their performance. While many health care organizations have long recognized the need to look beyond financial measures when evaluating their performance, many still struggle with what measures to select and how to use the results of those measures. Because a growing number of health care professionals have readily adopted quality concepts, health care organizations should be able to quickly improve their performance measurement systems by following a few simple rules.

History

A brief look at the evolution of quality in modern health care systems may help understand the need to improve performance measurement.