Difficult decisions arise when we face complex, multifaceted choices, typically enmeshed in a web of tradeoffs. To simplify decision-making while instilling confidence, we need Value Ratings.
A Value Rating is a single number that summarizes and ranks each alternative across multiple categories of performance. It is a special kind of composite measure.
The Value Rating accounts for your unique signature of preferences across different performance attributes.
The key to Value Ratings is revealing your Preference Profile, which serves as the foundation for producing quantitative, comprehensive, and tailored summary ratings. An easy-to-use survey detects both the priority and relative importance of your preferences across multiple aspects you need to consider.
With your Value Rating, you will immediately see which choices perform best in the areas that matter most to you. It is more than a simple ranking. You will see how competitive the options are, or if there is a clear standout, given your cares and interests.
Healthcare origins
The methodology to produce Value Ratings originated in the healthcare sector. In healthcare, the need for a simple, condensed, and tailored summary score has been acute for many years.
In the early 2000s, advances in computing power and data storage unleashed optimism that we could measure performance in healthcare systematically and comprehensively using algorithms and other data-mining techniques. These performance measures depend on data sources such as administrative claims, electronic health records, and disease registries. Today, the healthcare industry has entered an unprecedented era of performance measurement of hospitals, physicians, health plans, and other actors in the sector.
Performance measure overload
Seemingly overnight, the number of healthcare performance measures, addressing a wide variety of performance attributes, ballooned. The sheer volume of performance results now overwhelms the capacity of decision-makers to harness and use them.
People began to demand composite measures: summary scores that accurately reflect multiple individual measures. In healthcare, the need is critical because insurance arrangements increasingly incentivize consumers and employers to consider how healthcare providers perform in quality, cost, and other areas.
However, efforts to create useful composite measures been lackluster at best. This is because they have been one-size-fits-all performance summaries. These may be interesting in the abstract, but for individuals who prefer some categories of performance over others, they are not useful.
Value Ratings resolve these shortcomings, and offer many additional benefits
Consumers, employers, and others can finally combine a multitude of discrete performance measures into a summary score. They can make comparisons that are direct, accurate, fair, and relevant. And for critically important decisions, Value Ratings contain special guidance concerning Evidence Strength — an indication of when you are witnessing reliably high performance. But most importantly, they can make comparisons that are personalized.
(For an illustration of Value Ratings using real healthcare performance data, click here.)