Rethinking Healthcare Performance Evaluation Systems towards the People-Centredness Approach: Their Pathways, their...

Patient experience should be the starting point to achieve a high quality of care. Coherently, healthcare performance evaluation systems, driving the change in line with the main strategic goals, should be designed considering the patient perspective. Instead, they are traditionally defined according to the healthcare service provider's point of view. Consequently, they reproduce a "silo-vision" characterized by a clear separation of responsibilities limited to a specific setting of care or to a single organization. This commentary discusses the importance of using patient-reported measures together with indicators based on administrative data to evaluate cross-setting healthcare services within a multidimensional healthcare performance evaluation system. The experience of the Tuscany regional healthcare Performance Measurement System (PMS), implemented more than 10 years ago and in continuous evolution, represents an innovative example of how to measure the quality of the whole care pathway including patient experience. This new approach is based on a systematic, systemic and standardized collection of patient-reported experience measures in several healthcare pathways and evaluating them using a coherent graphical representation. Targets, incentives and other managerial tools are fixed, overcoming organizational boundaries and integrating the patient point of view with the goal of moving the healthcare system towards a patient-centredness approach to care.