ABSTRACT
Health care is becoming increasingly data driven. As both the accuracy of measures and the ability to gather and analyze data improve through the adoption of electronic health records, standardization of measures, and increasing organizational capacity for data analytics, clinical leaders must expand their ability to use data to drive improvement. By establishing more effective measures to assess institutional and provider performance, health care organizations have the potential to stimulate greater accountability and improve performance. There are four steps to effectively using data for feedback and improvement: (1) collecting data, (2) displaying data, (3) analyzing data, and (4) using data to drive improvement cycles. This chapter describes Steps 1 through 3. Step 4, using data to implement improvement cycles, is explained in detail in Chapter 2.
