The Quality of medical care is a statistical measure. No single definition of healthcare quality is all encompassing or uniformly agreed upon, but certainly no product or service can be improved if it cannot be defined and measured. The Office of Technology Assessment (OTA), JCAHO, and most other organizations use quality definitions that acknowledge the relationship between medical processes and their resultant outcomes, as well as the limits of medical knowledge.

In its definition of quality, JCAHO describes the relationship between care processes and outcomes as “the degree to which the processes of delivering health service increases the probability of desired patient outcomes and decreases the probability of undesired outcomes...” Implicit in these definitions is the valid observation that the extent or measures (degrees) of the processes utilized by care providers to deliver health services are responsible for the observed outcomes.

Verras provides hospitals with the technologies and metrics to measure and improve organizational and clinical process to continuously improve all three dimension of quality – Structure, Process and Outcomes. The most comprehensive expression of inpatient quality improvement is the Index of Accountable Care (IAC). It is a flexible tool that allows a hospital to measure addition outcomes in conjunction with the five fundamental metrics, which are three years of trended performances of: National Hospital Quality Measures, Reductions In Variation, Risk-adjusted Mortality Rates, Risk-adjusted Morbidity Rates and Resource Consumption.

The IAC is easily interpreted by patients, employers and providers alike, much like a Dow Jones Index that can be analyzed down to its most basic quality measures. These same metrics are used by hospitals and clinicians to improve each measure and, where deployed, reimburse the hospitals and physicians on value (quality and costs).

• Acuity Index Method
• Best Practice Analyzer (Sherlock™)
• Accreditation Support Measures
• Index of Accountable Care (IAC)
• Index of Quality Improvement (IQI)