From the first days of their training, physicians are enjoined to remember that the patient is more than the disease. Good clinicians look past the diagnoses to focus on the unique individual whose illness must be interpreted and treated in its human context.
In the world of quality measurement in health care, by contrast, patients are first and foremost their diseases. Only when the individuals are reduced to a series of DRGs (diagnosis related group codes) can hard metrics such as survival, readmission rates, and nosocomial complications be tallied and compared.