Organizing Quality Measures To Reduce Information Overload

As the number of available quality measures grows, report designers face the challenge of providing a great deal of information without overwhelming the user. In addition, individual users of the report may be interested in different measures, so they need a quick and easy way to find the information they really care about. One goal of the report designer is to organize the measures so that people have an intuitive sense of what they are likely to find in each section of the report.

This section describes a variety of ways to organize your measures into more digestible “chunks,” both to reduce information overload and to help people find just what they want.

• Using Composites
• Organizing Measures by Quality Domain (e.g., safety, effectiveness, timeliness)
• Organizing Measures by Disease or Condition (e.g., congestive heart failure, asthma, cancer)
• Organizing Measures by Type (e.g., structure, process, outcome, patient experience)
• Organizing Measures by Data Source (e.g., medical records, claims, patient surveys)

In some cases, it may be possible to organize measures by more than one dimension. For example, one might initially categorize by quality domains, and then group measures within a domain by diagnosis or condition.

Also in "Translate Data Into Information"

• Why Good Presentation Matters
• Generating Scores that Show Differences in Performance
• Describing Measures in User-friendly Ways
• Organizing Measures to Reduce Information Overload
• Choosing a Point of Comparison
• Displaying the Data
• Taking Advantage of Web Functionalities