Outcomes Management

Abstract

We pay dearly for the possession of the intricate machinery which gives us our vivid imagination, our retentive memory, and that power by which we are able to grasp at each moment all the threads of our past experience and to weave them into a new fabric for the service of the present. Mischief begins when the demands of this service cannot be properly met.—James J. Putnam, M.D., Shattuck Lecture, 1899.1 When the President proclaimed in 1969 that our nation faced a health care crisis, it was not news to the medical community. Costs were surging. Patients were beginning . . .