Concept and measurement of pediatric value

In the new health care marketplace, families will be making important decisions concerning choice of health plan, health provider, and even accountable care organizations. Ideally, they would make these decisions using information on health care value, which comprises the relationships between patient/family-centered outcomes (the outputs of health care services) and costs of providing care to achieve these outcomes. Providing information on pediatric value will require new investments in data collection systems that include outcomes that matter to children and families and costs measured at the level of the child. The analysis of these data must account for the perspective of the user of the information. In the case of families, direct standardization should be used to contrast care in one health care system with another according to the unique characteristics of each family and child.