ABSTRACT
The passage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) legislation did not solve one of the fundamental challenges in health care: measuring the value of health care services. In any service encounter there is a service provider and a service receiver. In the case of health care, the provider is the clinician, and the receiver is the patient. Companies providing products to the health care industry for the most part expect their products to enhance the quality of the service being provided. Public and private organizations have struggled to measure the outcomes of the services provided in the health care industry. Most common perhaps is the Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set (HEDIS), developed by the National Committee for Quality Assurance. Electronic medical records (EMR) capabilities since then have focused almost exclusively on improving the processes of collecting, managing and accessing patient data without clear evidence that the outcomes of these processes have changed significantly.
