Overview, history, and objectives of performance measurement.

This article provides an overview of health care performance measurement, including a chronological history of the major developments in the performance measurement field. It is not intended to be all-encompassing in its descriptions of events and organizations but, rather, its purpose is to provide a broad historical context for describing health care measurement activities of the past 50 years. This article also highlights the key constituents driving performance measurement (government payers, private sector regulators, business coalitions, health care providers, and health care consumers), how they have influenced what is measured (the content of performance measurement), and why. This article concludes by establishing the commonalties among constituents and forecast what the foreseeable future may hold regarding performance measurement.