The Perioperative Surgical Home (PSH) concept is a patient-centered effort to coordinate care from the decision for surgery through the preoperative evaluation and preparation, intraoperative procedure and recovery from anesthesia, postoperative hospital care, rehabilitation and return to normal function. Performance measures, or metrics, provide the ability to track patient progress during their time in the PSH, generate reports on the functioning of the PSH and guide process improvement. The metrics are also used to generate executive dashboards to display overall performance at a glance. Figure 1 illustrates the central role of metrics in the PSH health care model.
Metrics can be thought of in terms of process measures and outcomes measures. The process is how a system works, and the outcome is the final product or result. For example, process metrics for pain management include the rate of documentation of preoperative pain scores and preoperative opiate tolerance; listing the post-op...
