Balanced measures for patient-centered care.

The Institute for Healthcare Improvement has long supported the use of balanced measures to assess improvement among patients at both the individual and the population levels. Although biomedical outcomes and process measures have been widely accepted, patient-reported measures are still not in widespread use. The most common use of such measures is at the population level to gauge satisfaction with care long after it has been provided. This article examines barriers and solutions to including patient-reported measures at the point of care.