Whole System Measures 2.0: A Compass for Health System Leaders

IHI developed Whole System Measures 2.0 (WSM 2.0) to provide specific guidance to health care system leaders and boards on how to measure current overall system performance and use this data to inform organizational strategy. WSM 2.0 is a set of 15 measures that help leaders better understand their organization’s current (and desired) state across three domains (the Triple Aim): population health, experience of care, and per capita cost.

This work builds on the original Whole System Measures IHI White Paper, published in 2007, and ongoing efforts to advance the Triple Aim. While directive, this small measure set creates the opportunity for health care system leaders, managers, clinicians, and staff to drill down further to understand specific performance challenges or successes, and to identify strategic opportunities for improvement.

Many efforts to develop core measures of quality have emerged in recent years. While these efforts are important and substantive in their own right, they also contribute to health care measurement complexity, highlighting the need for clarity and parsimony to enable senior leaders to understand the overall performance of their systems.

The individual measures that comprise WSM 2.0 are not new; pulling them together to gain the appropriate level of understanding of quality across the system is new. While we do need to reduce measurement burden, we also need to rationalize the measures that exist. WSM 2.0 is intended to provide specific guidance to health care system leaders and boards on how to do just that: measure overall system performance and use this data to inform organizational strategy.

How to Cite This Paper: 
Martin L, Nelson E, Rakover J, Chase A. Whole System Measures 2.0: A Compass for Health System Leaders. IHI White Paper. Cambridge, MA: Institute for Healthcare Improvement; 2016. (Available at ihi.org)