Transparency Standards for Diabetes Performance Measures

Regardless of the direction US health care reform takes, performance measurement, public reporting, and accountability will play major roles. Presently, a number of entities have staked out business models for developing, collecting, and disseminating operational data about performance at the hospital, health plan, and clinician levels. Critical to such a system are valid measures that permit fair comparisons. Indeed, generalization of randomized controlled trials to larger populations for performance measurement is a complex process that invariably involves judgment of the health benefit of the proposed measure as well as technical issues. Such factors include importance, scientific evidence, reproducibility, validity, precision, specification (including inclusion and exclusion criteria for the measure denominator), and feasibility in practice. The validity of methods measurement development, and adoption must be transparent. Transparency has been defined as "a process by which information about existing conditions, decisions and actions is . . .Click here for full text article