Measuring the quality of a complex service like critical care that combines the highest technology with the most intimate caring is a challenge. Recently, con sumers, clinicians, and payers have requested more formal assessments and comparisons of the quality and costs of medical care 2). Donabedian 1) pro posed a framework for thinking about the quality of medical care that separates quality into three components: structure, process, and outcome. An instructive analogy for understanding this framework is to imagine a food critic evaluating the quality of a restaurant. The critic might...

Measuring the quality of a complex service like critical care that combines the highest technology with the most intimate caring is a challenge. Recently, con- sumers, clinicians, and payers have requested more formal assessments and comparisons of the quality and costs of medical care 2]. Donabedian 1] pro- posed a framework for thinking about the quality of medical care that separates quality into three components: structure, process, and outcome. An instructive analogy for understanding this framework is to imagine a food critic evaluating the quality of a restaurant. The critic might...