Clinical Outcomes Role in The Healthcare Industry, The Complexity of Procurement and Applied Implications

“Clinical outcomes” has become a popular phrase among clinicians, hospital managers, government regulators, health insurers, policy makers and healthcare economy specialists. Compared to other sectors, the health care industry has a different approach to quality measurement since classic tools and basic principles such as economic profitability or human resources necessity in many occasions do not apply.  Among other reasons, this is due to the complexities related to characterizing various aspects surrounding care and the fact that high-quality care is not always correlated with desired outcomes.  Therefore, measures recommended by traditional methods sometimes simply cannot be implemented. Since the “end product” of the healthcare pipeline can be multifaceted and frequently hard to define, the most logical solution would be to measure it by clinical outcomes.

In this paper, we will review the literature on this issue and describe the process of extracting the data and defining which indices will be measures at Sheba Medical Center in order to evaluate clinical outcomes.