To succeed in outcomes measurement, leaders need to understand key current initiatives, barriers, and the role of information technology. Managed care has fueled a growing uneasiness that providers care more about the bottom line than individuals' health. As a result, consumers are more discriminating and vocal about what they want, and health care organizations are held increasingly accountable for the results, or outcomes, they achieve. But the movement isn't pushed by health care consumers alone.
Advocates are in all corners, including accreditation bodies.
1 Standards that focus on the patient's well-being cut across all models of care, categories of disease and health conditions, and all types of providers. Simply put, when health care organizations do the right things, they're most likely to achieve good outcomes, which translates into positives for patients, providers, and payers alike. They paint a picture of an application that captures information at the point of care and distributes it instantly across the enterprise to the clinical, administrative, and financial users who then mine each episode for data to apply to the system's quality targets. These decision support systems that vendors describe originated in the financial arena. They're good at enabling managers to analyze data and past performance to value services and identify business opportunities.