How Measurement Fails Doctors and Teachers

[elleng]

'TWO of our most vital industries, health care and education, have become increasingly subjected to metrics and measurements. Of course, we need to hold professionals accountable. But the focus on numbers has gone too far. We’re hitting the targets, but missing the point.

Through the 20th century, we adopted a hands-off approach, assuming that the pros knew best. Most experts believed that the ideal “products” — healthy patients and well-educated kids — were too strongly influenced by uncontrollable variables (the sickness of the patient, the intellectual capacity of the student) and were too complex to be judged by the measures we use for other industries.

By the early 2000s, as evidence mounted that both fields were producing mediocre outcomes at unsustainable costs, the pressure for measurement became irresistible. In health care, we saw hundreds of thousands of deaths from medical errors, poor coordination of care and backbreaking costs. In education, it became clear that our schools were lagging behind those in other countries.

So in came the consultants and out came the yardsticks. In health care, we applied metrics to outcomes and processes. Did the doctor document that she gave the patient a flu shot? That she counseled the patient about smoking? In education, of course, the preoccupation became student test scores.

All of this began innocently enough. But the measurement fad has spun out of control.'>>>

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/17/opinion/sunday/how-measurement-fails-doctors-and-teachers.html?

[KT2000]

1. everything should be run

as a business and this is what happens.

Our hospital has a higher death rate than most because of the older age of our population. When my elderly friend broke her pelvis the hospital would not do surgery to ease her pain. Instead the sent her off to a nursing home so drugged she was rarely awake. The nursing home doctor saw how inhumane that was and ordered the surgery. She came through just fine.

The most important thing was that the hospital did not have another death to add to their count. It is a business after all.

[Goblinmonger]

2. As someone involved in the new teacher effectiveness process,

it's a joke. We are creating numbers for the sake of numbers. I still close my door and make students learn, but what they are trying to get proof of is not what they really want. It's just more hoop jumping to make those that know nothing about education happy.

[Half-Century Man]

3. More kowtowing to the dubious policy of applying business metric everywhere.

Metrics can be used in deceptive manners to reach predetermined conclusions. We see this being used all the time to justify stagnating the wages of the worker.
Figures don't lie, but liars can figure.

It is nice to see the NYTs publicly admitting that the money addicted usurpers of education and health care don't know what they are doing and are just flailing around.

It is nice to be efficient, but sometimes.the greatest good comes from not streamlining a process.

Health care and education coming into undeniable crisis in the early 2000s wasn't from the sudden inability to preform the tasks they had been doing for decades, but from the failed policies of Reaganomics and the redistribution of wealth upwards. The solution, as always, was blame the victim.
No one has redirected us away from Conservative subjugation. So the crisis has grown. Now, they seek a new party to blame.

Simply end the forty plus years of following the money addicted into the gutters as they search for their next fix.