Copyright 2000, the National Academy Press. Keywords, machine extracted. Top 50 words repeated twice, next 100 once, plus phrases. The workshop was jointly sponsored by IOM's Committee on Quality of Health Care in America and the National Cancer Policy Board, with financial support from the Agency for Healthcare Re- search and Quality. Ethan Haim, Clara Lee, and Mark Chassin of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine and a synthesis of the literature relevant to policy issues by Dr. Adams Dudley and colleagues from the University of California, San Francisco.
Volume is, however, an imprecise indicator of quality.
With few exceptions, however, the literature does not shed light on the structures or processes of care that underlie the apparent relationship. Many workshop participants noted that volume may be the best available proxy indicator of quality for certain conditions, but efforts should be made to accompany volume information with other quality indicators and with explanatory information. In making such disclosure, however, the limitations of the data and how to interpret the information must be made clear to the intended audience. Public release of data on volume may motivate providers to report process and outcome data, thereby laying the ground for the next generation of health care quality measures. When better measures of quality of care than volume are developed, they should replace the volume measures.