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What Gets Measured Gets Improved

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal featured an article on how Pennsylvania's health care has gotten better and cheaper in the twenty years since the state began publishing outcomes data. Further proof (if more was needed) that what gets measured gets improved, I guess.

As I read the article, I searched in vain for an expression of embarrassment from a physician or hospital administrator...

...embarrassment that Pennsylvania's system was forced on a recalcitrant industry by frustrated customers.

...embarrassment that, if it weren't for those customers forcing the issue, undoubtedly health care quality would STILL be pronounced too amorphous to measure, and...

...embarrassment that, twenty years after the fact and despite all the evidence to the contrary, the article is replete with examples of doctors and hospitals still questioning the program's data collection and reporting methodologies.

"You don't understand! Our patients are (a) sicker, (b) older, (c) poorer, (d) different, (e) more co-morbid, (f) all of the above, (g) none of the above...ah heck we're artists and we just don't like being measured!"

And that, my friends, is further proof of health care's extended side trip through the weeds of leadership and brand adolescence.

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