Measurement plays an important role in your efforts to improve care for persons with asthma by helping you to evaluate the impact of changes you make to improve the delivery of care. But your goal is to improve care for people with asthma, not to design a perfect measurement system. Your team needs just enough measurement to determine whether changes you are making are leading to improvement.

Outcome Measures
These measures tell you whether changes are actually leading to improvement — that is, helping to achieve the overall aim of reducing complications and improving outcomes for patients with asthma. Examples include number of symptom free days in previous two weeks.

Process Measures
To affect the outcome measure of increasing the number of symptom free days, you will make changes to improve many core processes — including the processes for self-management, decision support, clinical information systems, and delivery system design — as well as changes to improve the health care organization and community. Measuring the results of these process changes will tell you if the changes are leading to improved care for patients. Examples include appropriate treatment with anti-inflammatory medication.