Outcome Metrics
By Chad Whelan, MD & David Klocke, MD
These are the metrics that you should be most interested in improving. These metrics should tie directly to your goals, the reasons you are interested in this improvement project. Outcome metrics may be clinical outcomes, cost savings outcomes, or hospital performance outcomes. Your project may have several goals, and so you may decide to look at several outcome metrics. These metrics are often more difficult to obtain and are also less responsive to the interventions. For example, ACS mortality can be affected by a multitude of internal and external factors that you may not be able to control for with your improvement project. That does not mean you should not use them, but rather that you should use them thoughtfully. Although many of these will be clinical outcomes, you may also want to consider using hospital performance outcomes. Examples of outcome metrics might include:
- In-hospital mortality (a recommended metric).
- 30-Day risk-adjusted heart attack mortality (a CMS core measure).
- 30-Day readmission rates (a recommended metric).
- Percentile performance on HospitalCompare.
The first 3 are examples of clinical outcomes. The HospitalCompare performance measure is really a medical center performance outcome rather than a clinical measure.
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