If all health care were useful and effective at creating health, measuring throughput would be the right way to
measure productivity. However, there’s substantial evidence that a great deal of the medical care we provide doesn’t
make patients any healthier.6 Studies have found, for example, that high-intensity end-of-life care may not keep
patients alive any longer than hospice care.7 There is a large body of data showing that many treatments offer little or
minimal value to patients (e.g. prostate specific antigen (PSA) screening for prostate cancer, which was recently
found by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force to offer no benefit but which poses significant risk from false
positives and subsequent testing), and many others are given to the wrong patients.8 When measuring productivity,
therefore, any meaningful metric has to account for whether the services provided actually did anything to improve
health, either of individuals or of populations.
For tests and treatments to offer any benefit, they must have three characteristics: they must be effective, highquality,
and well matched to the patient. Effective treatments increase length or quality of life, even after accounting
for the side effects of treatment – that is, for a defined patient population, they offer a net benefit. Not all common
treatments are effective (especially when they’re used outside of the originally-studied patient population), and
clearly ineffective treatments that don’t lengthen or improve life don’t create any value. High-quality services are
those provided with no errors and in accordance with all relevant guidelines and best practices. Low-quality
treatments include, for example, surgery without appropriate prophylactic antibiotics. They put patients at risk of
harm, and don’t provide the medical benefits they should. Low-quality treatments are clearly not as valuable as highquality
treatments.9