Consortium Research on Indicators of System Performance (CRISP)

Since the CRISP project is in its early stages, reports of performance indicator data are not yet available. It will be late in 1994 before we have sufficient experience with our measures to encourage their use for both internal quality improvement and external evaluation. Some of our participating systems are quite far along in the development of individual indicators and have some experience with their fluctuations over time, but we are just beginning the process of studying cross-system comparisons. Use of measures in comparing the performance of integrated delivery systems is still an unproved technology, no matter how successful the measures may have been in other contexts. We believe that our approach to measuring system performance fits very well with the current direction of health care reform. We hope that the project will allow integrated systems of care to take a lead role in defining and testing measures of performance.