Measuring Performance in Psychiatry
A Call to Action
Published in: Psychiatric Services, 2015
Posted on RAND.org on April 22, 2015
Many recent public and private strategies aimed at improving the quality and efficiency of the U.S. health care system focus on measuring, reporting on, and providing incentives for improving quality. In behavioral health care, despite recent efforts, quality measurement for even the more common conditions is less well developed than for comparable general medical conditions. The absence of a comprehensive set of well-accepted measures capable of demonstrating the value of behavioral health treatment makes building a case for devoting resources to treatment more difficult. This Open Forum reviews the current state of behavioral health quality measurement, describes the criteria relevant to assessing measures, and provides a case for encouraging the development, collection, and routine use of functional outcome measures in behavioral health care.
This report is part of the RAND Corporation External publication series. Many RAND studies are published in peer-reviewed scholarly journals, as chapters in commercial books, or as documents published by other organizations.
The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.