Identifying meaningful outcome measures for the intensive care unit.

Despite important progress in measuring the safety of health care delivery in a variety of health care settings, a comprehensive set of metrics for benchmarking is still lacking, especially for patient outcomes. Even in high-risk settings where similar procedures are performed daily, such as hospital intensive care units (ICUs), these measures largely do not exist. Yet we cannot compare safety or quality across institutions or regions, nor can we track whether safety is improving over time.