Use of EHR-Based Pediatric Quality Measures: Views of Health System Leaders and Parents

Measures of health care quality are produced from a variety of data sources, but often, physicians do not believe these measures reflect the quality of provided care. The aim was to assess the value to health system leaders (HSLs) and parents of benchmarking on health care quality measures using data mined from the electronic health record (EHR). Using in-context interviews with HSLs and parents, the authors investigated what new decisions and actions benchmarking using data mined from the EHR may enable and how benchmarking information should be presented to be most informative. Results demonstrate that although parents may have little experience using data on health care quality for decision making, they affirmed its potential value. HSLs expressed the need for high-confidence, validated metrics. They also perceived barriers to achieving meaningful metrics but recognized that mining data directly from the EHR could overcome those barriers. Parents and HSLs need high-confidence health care quality data to support decision making.