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Comment by nine_zeros | Hacker News Reader

How about a quality and happy customer metric?

How about a quality patient care metric?

How about a metric which asks patients if they felt that the doctor could spend adequate time with them?

How about a metric that measures how long it takes from a phone call to see the doctor?

Ultimately, a lot of metric measuring management is not measuring what customers are asking for. They are only measuring BS that looks good to layers of management, with questionable value produced.

No wonder people have become cynical and unhappy. Our institutions have forgotten to serve the people they are taking money and time from.

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This is not necessarily easy. For example, one of the metrics that patients in my field often advocate for is a stochastic, noisy signal at the end of a long causal chain. It's an important metric, but it's one that's very hard to actually use.

But it's one that feels straightforward: Death.

> For example, one of the metrics that patients in my field often advocate for is a stochastic, noisy signal at the end of a long causal chain. But it's one that feels straightforward: Death.

Which is why this is a dumb metric.

You don't need to measure time to death. You need to measure time to response and time that the patient got with the doctor.

And then, build systems that minimize mttr and maximize time with patient.

To minimize mttr, hire more doctors who can be available.

To maximize time with each patient, hire more doctors.

Ultimately you need to have the right intent to begin with. And the right intent is to not measure the time to death. It is to measure the time to help and to make sure doctors get all the help in minimizing the time to help.

Feel free to start with HEDIS and then move along to whichever healthcare quality metric group strikes your fancy next!

https://www.ncqa.org/hedis/measures/

What happens when doctor attention is negatively correlated with quality of life?

A very inspiring series on data driven approach to management discusses this: https://commoncog.com/goodharts-law-not-useful/

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