“While the mania to measure health care outcomes and processes has produced some successes, a hospital medicine leader argues that the "measurement fad has spun out of control." In an opinion piece in the New York Times, UCSF's Robert Wachter, MD, details the unintended consequences that have resulted from a surfeit of measurement and metrics: a proliferation of increasingly meaningless hospital-rating systems as well as EHR fatigue and clinician burnout. The move to measure hospital-acquired infections has saved lives, Dr. Wachter writes, but too many other measures just impose a burden of box checking. Health care metrics need to be more targeted and vetted, he concludes, and the burden on clinicians must be minimized”. 1

Let's face it. Hospital executives consider performance metrics necessary, and hospitalists likely view them as a necessary evil. However viewed, the use of performance metrics is not going to disappear. We should be about the business of developing the most relevant and meaningful and measurable metrics possible.  This is particularly true as the practice of connecting compensation with performance will only become more prevalent.

It has been our observation that more communication and collaboration is needed in this arena. Neither the relevance of the metrics nor the method for computing the results are well understood by most hospitalists. As a result, hospitals are disappointed with the impact or lack thereof.

Conversely, what a great opportunity for a hospital and hospitalist team to jointly develop and implement a system of performance metrics that actually makes sense and a difference!

1 As published on 01/29/16 by Today’s Hospitalist in its “Weekly News Brief for Hospitalists”