| Abstract: | The mandate for health care organizations to be accountable for quality, as well as price, is now unavoidable. The Joint Commission's ORYX project is requiring every hospital to measure clinical outcomes of a majority of its patients within the next three years. This mandate can be met best with systems of clinical outcomes measurement that provide valid, reliable risk adjustment; yield meaningful information about many different diseases and procedures; and measure more than mortality or cost--all using primarily billing data. New outcomes measurement tools with all of these capabilities are available and have already enabled quality improvement in dozens of hospitals across the U.S. |
