Improving Health-Care Quality Through Measurement

Extensive evidence exists demonstrating that health-care is plagued with overutilization of inappropriate services, underutilization of appropriate services, and avoidable medical errors. Over the last few decades, the emphasis on “closing the quality gap” in health-care has escalated and intensified. Furthermore, measures of quality have become tools to curb rising and unsustainable health-care costs. To understand the evolving landscape of health-care quality and national payment reform initiatives, it is important to have a fundamental understanding of what quality in health-care is and how it is most appropriately measured and used to, ultimately, improve the care of our patients. In this chapter, we first present an overview of quality in health-care. Using this background, we then describe how health-care quality can be measured. Last, we describe four ways quality measures are commonly used in health-care: quality improvement, accreditation and verification, public reporting, and value-based care.