The past several decades of price wars in medicine have taken their toll -- and nowhere has the impact been greater than in the field of psychiatry. Today, patients and physicians alike are protesting -- louder than ever -- that quality patient care is being sacrificed to cost-cutting goals.

What is quality patient care? Quality measures (i.e., validity, reliability, feasibility, usability, and comparability) link the care rendered to the results (i.e., outcomes) of that care, enabling us to define, measure, publicly report, compare, and ultimately improve care.

This...