Development of process and outcome measures for improvement: lessons learned in a quality improvement collaborative for pediatric inflammatory bowel disease.

The Institute of Medicine's publications, To Err is Human and Crossing the Quality Chasm, publicized the widespread deficits in healthcare quality. The quality of care in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) has not been comprehensively evaluated, in part due to a lack of well-established IBD measures of quality. Quality can be measured for evaluation, benchmarking, or continuous quality improvement, using structural, process, and outcome measures. Measurement is an essential component of the model for improvement, necessary to determine whether changes made have resulted in improvement. Measures used for quality improvement should be based on evidence and consensus, be clear and collectable in a timely fashion, occur with sufficient frequency, and have the potential to improve outcomes. While no current IBD measures of quality are perfect, an iterative process of measure development can produce a set of measures that are feasible, relevant, and useful for performing quality improvement. This review describes the history, rationale, and methods of quality measurement and discusses the early work and lessons learned from measuring quality of care in a pediatric IBD quality improvement collaborative.