P.Mean: What single idea will make the biggest impact on healthcare today (created 2011-09-16). News: Sign up for "The Monthly Mean," the newsletter that dares to call itself average, www.pmean.com/news.

Someone posed a thought provoking question on the Evidence-Based-Health list. "What single idea will make the biggest impact on healthcare today?" Here's how I responded.

Quality improvement. Healthcare professionals need to develop an ethic of measuring what they are doing and learning from those measurements. They need to identify inappropriate variation in health care delivery and remove that variation. They need to publish information (with proper risk adjustment) that will allow health care consumers to make good choices in where they seek care.

This is not easy to do, of course. Measurement of the wrong things, failure to recognize and account for appropriate variations in health care delivery, and biased report cards will cause more problems than they will solve. Doing quality improvement well is more than just number crunching.

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