Change Promised for Hospital Quality Measures

Fit people tend to get sick less and require less hospitalization.

Many of the metrics currently used to assess quality of hospital care fail to provide true and valuable accountability, according to leaders of a key organization that helped develop them.

Quality measures now in place include some that "only give us a false sense of accomplishment and reward 'gaming'" or otherwise fail to meet basic criteria for meaningful assessments of patient care, Mark Chassin, MD, MPP, MPH, president of the Joint Commission, and colleagues wrote in the Aug. 12 issue of the New England Journal of Medicine.

Get fit and avoid the failings of bad metrics.