Types of Measures of Improvement Efforts

During improvement efforts, it is important to distinguish between measures that achieve the goal and measures that monitor adherence to the intervention. For example, a goal may be to reduce medication errors, and an intervention to achieve this may be to complete a medication reconciliation form at discharge. The goal is to reduce the percentage of patients discharged with a medication error. To improve this, we may monitor the percentage of patients who have a completed intervention, such as with a medication reconciliation form. However, we generally measure adherence to an intervention only while we are focusing efforts on that intervention; if we change the intervention, what we measure may change. We should measure the goal continuously.