Measurement of the outcome of learning: Health care performance measurement and continuing medical education

✍ Scribed by Geoffrey M. Anderson

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1999
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 49 KB
• Volume: 19
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0894-1912
• DOI: 10.1002/chp.1340190407

✦ Synopsis

We have entered an era in which the principles of performance assessment and quality improvement developed in other contexts are being applied to the health care system. Recently, a consensus statement indicated that it is now possible to measure the quality of care accurately and, when the performance of the health care system is systematically assessed, there are clear problems with underuse, overuse, and misuse of services. Furthermore, despite growing awareness of problems with the quality of care, little is done about improving care. 1 These provocative ideas have several important implications for continuing medical education (CME).

The identification of widespread problems with quality of care suggests that the current approach to CME has not been a complete success, since CME historically has been seen as a key element in maintaining quality of care. The increasing accuracy in measuring quality and push to make that information public means that deficiencies in quality of care will be identified more often and will become a more prominent health care issue in the eyes of the public. This will put increasing pressure on payers and providers to