The outcome of medical outcomes assessment: it's not necessarily academic.

The outcomes assessment movement has the potential to significantly enhance the practice of medicine by enabling physicians to identify and implement what works. It represents a rich wellspring of material for investigation and is already proving to be an important source of research support. As such, it also represents a boon to academic medicine, whose activities in patient care, research, and education it may enrich. Yet outcomes research may also prove itself a threat to academic medicine insofar as the "outcomes" of the academic medical center are not adequately represented in its deliberations and recommendations. Ultimately, the results of the outcomes movement will be defined--both now and in the generation to come--by medicine's guiding vision. It behooves those who care about academic medicine to recall that this vision itself is a highly prized outcome.