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Healthcare Quality Data

Patient Safety Quality Monthly, September 27, 2005

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Dear Colleague,

"Perfect should never be the enemy of good."

I'm not sure who said this, but I believe this saying is highly applicable to the realm of today's healthcare quality data. We all want data about healthcare quality to be valid, reliable, and accurate. We all want data about healthcare quality to fairly represent the great things we do as individual professionals and as institutions. We all want the data about us to be perfect.

The problem is that there is no perfect data. There certainly is bad data. We have all seen data that is so off-base that it is dangerous. Data that is so flawed by coding errors that conclusions regarding care are not appropriate or permissible. Sometimes data attributes adverse outcomes to the wrong physician because of flaws in our electronic billing systems that were never designed for clinical use.

But there is also good data. Data that tells us that our care systems are far from perfection and are in need of improvement. Data identifies outliers that make it reasonable to ask the question, "Why are you different?" and see where the answers take us.

If we wait for perfect data before we seek to improve the care we provide to our patients, we can delude ourselves into believing we have nothing to improve.

But if we establish an expectation in our healthcare institutions and our medical staffs that we will be open to using data that may not be perfect, then perfect will never be the enemy of good.

Regards,

Bob Marder, MD
Practice Director, Quality and Patient Safety
The Greeley Company

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