Samantha Kelen (sam@samanthakelen.com) is Chief Ethics and Compliance Officer at Cardinal Innovations Healthcare in Charlotte, NC.
Measuring effectiveness was once considered a best practice—something that only the most advanced programs had managed to wrangle. But as with most of the practices that lead the way to improvement, measuring effectiveness is now considered a must-have, not just a nice-to-have. Some folks believe that fitting your program into a box defined by numbers can undermine its true impact, but I tend to fall into the “you can’t improve something that isn’t measured” camp. And for that reason, I believe well-crafted metrics are critical to monitoring and reporting on the success of your program.