National Voluntary Consensus Standards for Cost and Resource Use 

As current health reform efforts focus on expanding coverage, increasing access to care, and reducing costs, it is important to understand how the system uses resources in the context of health outcomes. Combining resource use (or cost) and quality data will enable the system to better evaluate efficiency of care. Understanding resource use measurement as a building block of efficiency is a first step toward this goal. This Consensus Development Process project endorsed eight resource use measures that will serve as the foundation for efficiency-of-care measures and signal the measure-development industry of the urgent need to develop measures of efficiency that integrate quality and resource-use domains.