Are we ready and how do we know? The urgent need for performance metrics in hospital emergency management.

An extraordinary number of health care quality and patient safety indicators have been developed for hospitals and other health care institutions; however, few meaningful indicators exist for comprehensive assessment of hospital emergency management. Although health care institutions have invested considerable resources in emergency management preparedness, the need for universally accepted, evidence-based performance metrics to measure these efforts remains largely unfulfilled. We suggest that this can be remediated through the application of traditional health care quality paradigms, coupled with novel analytic approaches to develop meaningful performance data in hospital emergency management.