Information Engineering for Value in Pediatric Emergency Medicine

Emergency medicine continues to suffer from information gaps that limit progress on measurement and action on quality of care. Important progress has been made in defining structure, process, and short-term outcome measures that occur within the time boundary of the emergency department (ED) visit itself for ill and injured children. However, true progress toward value-based care requires insight into outcomes beyond the walls of the ED. Existing measures such as return visits are not uniformly endorsed as a reliable and actionable measure of quality. The advent of concepts such as learning networks and patient-reported outcomes, and changes in technology use and connectivity at the population level offer potential strategies for ED systems to consider in the creation of scalable and sustainable information strategies to drive our progress toward value-based care.