The percentage of physicians measuring and reporting outcomes to specialty-specific and government registries has climbed in recent years as a result of payer incentives, federal mandates and an improved understanding of how measuring outcomes improves patient care. While individual institutions have tracked their outcomes for decades, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Physician Quality Reporting System (PQRS) and discipline-specific data registries such as the Anesthesia Quality Institute (AQI) National Anesthesia Clinical Outcomes Registry (NACOR) have created a national perspective on practice patterns and results.
Although federal mandates for reporting and financial incentives in health care are relatively new, the utilization of outcomes measurement to improve performance has been active for decades. As early as the 1930s, E.A. Codman, a physician at the Massachusetts General Hospital, advocated “the common sense notion that every hospital should follow every patient it treats, long enough to determine whether or not the treatment...
