In order for surgeons to improve, they have to know how well they’re doing. In order to know how well they’re doing, they have to know how well their patients are doing. And this turns out to be trickier than you’d think. You need an apparatus that not only keeps meticulous records, but keeps them consistently, and throughout the entire life cycle of the patient.

Great article on the need for performance measurement and feedback. This article focuses on surgeons, but we need this everywhere in medicine. Unfortunately, as stated above, any efforts require meticulous and expansive data. This is one of the promises of electronic medical records, but we are far from that goal right now.

I would love to have a system like this for diagnostic accuracy for myself, especially as I train.