With a push towards value-based care comes value-of-care measures. As The Wall Street Journal reports, payers, providers and patients do not always have the same definition of quality.
The Wall Street Journal spoke with Scott Wallace, visiting professor at Dartmouth's Geisel School of Medicine; Thomas Guastavino, MD, a retired orthopedic surgeon from Pottsville, Pa., and Margaret O'Kane, founder and president of the National Committee for Quality Assurance, to discuss the issues of how to measure healthcare performance and quality. Here are three key quotes.
1. "Quality should focus on the functional outcomes that mean the most to patients. For a patient who got a knee replacement, can she walk and climb steps? For a man having prostate surgery, can we operate without causing incontinence and impotence? To find the keys, and not just look in good light, we need to track and report functional outcomes across all patients by each team or hospital." – Mr. Wallace.
2. "Patient outcomes are the true north of healthcare. If the things we do don't make patients better, then why are we doing them? … But we also need to be honest about the limits of outcomes measurement. We need very large numbers of patients to get reliable data." – Ms. O'Kane
3. "Physicians never have had a problem with patient safety. What we do have a problem with is the patently false assumption that physicians had such a cavalier attitude toward patient safety in the past that it now has to be imposed from the outside. Worse still, withholding payment for all expenses associated with complications like infections only makes sense if you believe that complications are 100 percent preventable, which they clearly are not." – Dr. Gustavo.
You can read the entire discussion here.
