Improving health care quality with outcomes management

Continuous quality improvement requires that we must first measure to manage care processes and outcomes. Health care quality instruments in general, and O&P instruments in particular, are rarely developed with the kind of care and precision taken for granted in other industries. New technologies for precision measurement in health care have recently emerged, creating new opportunities for informing quality improvement efforts. Orthotics and prosthetics could be one of the first areas of health care to employ these technologies, take advantage of the new opportunities, and establish common product definitions and comparable outcome measures, en route to rebalancing the cost-quality equation.