Posts Tagged ‘health data’
Tuesday, January 19, 2010
How will we know?
Jo Porter
New Hampshire Institute for Health Policy and Practice
In the current health reform climate, there is a tremendous amount of disagreement. Different political parties disagree about how close we are to a solution to the health care problem, members within individual parties disagree with one another, communities disagree with one another…it is a decisive issue. Yet, there are a couple of things that people do seem to agree on: 1) We have a problem that needs to be fixed and 2) we have to be able to measure our progress.
While there is agreement that we need to measure our progress, there is no clear indication of how we will do that. One issue, of course, is that data are so, um, modifiable in interpretation. The exact same statistic can be used by different people with different interpretations. And the data are imperfect. Does that mean that we should discount the need to measure progress? No.
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