Opinion Statement
What really matters when measuring patient safety depends on who is looking at the results. Patients and families expect safety and expect not to be harmed in the process of receiving care. Third-party payers may look to increase value and lower total payments by withholding payment for harm events. Providers often focus primarily on medical outcomes. Unfortunately, there is no overall safety score to compare providers and/or health care facilities and there are few validated measures of patient safety. Patient safety measurement currently relies on a large number of individual indicators. Many of the measures are disease specific and often are not validated. Patients and families have limited access to, and may have difficulty using, data for health care decision-making. More importantly, despite the proliferation of measures, health care has not become safer for patients. Health care providers must re-evaluate what really matters to those we serve—the patients and families—when measuring and reporting patient safety.