Dr. Jennifer Lundblad

caused to happen is the transparency around quality measurement and reporting that we have today.

It was a long and sometimes painful journey and we're still on it in many ways.

But in the early and mid 2000s, we for the first time had hospitals reporting

publicly a set of quality measures, common measures across all hospitals, similarly for nursing homes, similarly for home care agencies.

And that was really breakthrough at the time.

So the important part of that is instead of just looking inward and having data about what your own healthcare facility was doing, for the first time we had the ability to benchmark and compare.

And boy, if there's something that motivates healthcare organizations and clinicians and healthcare leaders to do better is when they see how they compare to their neighbors or competitors or someone else down the street.

I think the jury is still out about whether those data are useful for consumers, which was the hope and still is the hope.

But it absolutely has caused...

leaders and clinicians to say, oh, we're doing better here.

Let's share that broadly with our community and with our patients, or we're not doing as well.

We need to do better in these areas.

So that ability to benchmark and compare has really significantly changed how quality measurement, quality reporting, the whole milieu of who does that at a federal level, at a state level, at a regional level.

So

That bit of history, I think, is important because those data around quality measures, they weren't with us 25 years ago.

And that has really changed a lot in how we do our work and what we have access to.

So now I want to turn to your question about, so how do we make those decisions?

Certainly looking at data to say, where are there gaps?

Where are there needs?

Who can we learn from?