It is important to track three types of measures when you are working to improve the care for people with chronic conditions:

Outcome Measures
These measures tell you whether changes are actually leading to improvement — that is, helping to achieve the overall aim of reducing complications and improving outcomes for patients with diabetes. Examples include registry size, or reducing hemoglobin A1c (HbA1c) to less than 7 for patients with diabetes.

Process Measures
To affect the outcome measure of reducing HbA1c, you will make changes to improve many core processes — including the processes for self-management, decision support, clinical information systems, and delivery system design — as well as changes to improve the health care organization and community. Measuring the results of these process changes will tell you if the changes are leading to improved care for patients. Examples include percentage of patients with documented self-management goals, or percentage of patients with two HbA1cs in the last year.

Balancing Measures
Use these measures to make sure that changes to improve one part of the system aren’t causing new problems in other parts of the system.

For more information on establishing measures, see Improvement Methods.

To improve care for patients with diabetes, see the Diabetes measures.