Beacon Policy Brief Summary

It is paramount for any organization to set benchmarks in order to perform proper before and after studies. In order to ensure the best before and after studies are carried out, good baseline data must be collected; this may prove challenging for some organizations, as much of the data being collected is subjective or inconsistent. Two challenges presented in the Beacon Policy Brief address the improvement of data validity and the establishment of community-wide measurements (Rein, Sabharwal, Schachter, 2013). Data collection is a complicated topic, because there are so many sources of data and so many ways to collect it. The most important form of data for a service organization is baseline data, because it allows organizations to track improvements or declines. Many organizations have issues tracking their own
The first solution involves a review of record at the provider network level, which highlights missing and invalid data, which helps the individual practices provide consistent data to the network. The second solution calls for more standardized forms and less free-response entries, in order to create a more concise snapshot of patient status (Rein, Sabharwal, Schachter, 2013). In order to establish a framework for community-wide measurement, the Beacon Policy devised one solution, to create a standardized method of data collection, terminology, and measurements. If all practices in a given network were to record data in the same ways, meaningful network-level data would be much simpler to produce. The Beacon Policy Brief proposed to initiate this process through building trust amongst the providers, ensuring that rebuilding many documents and changing workflows will ultimately improve network operations (Rein, Sabharwal, Schachter,