Open access. Just over 50 years ago, Avedis Donabedian published his seminal paper, which sought to define and specify the ‘quality of health care’, articulating the now paradigmatic triad of structure, process and outcome for measuring healthcare quality.1 In recent years, we have seen the rapid expansion of increasingly inexpensive information technology capability and capacity, facilitating the collection and analysis of large healthcare data sets. These technological advances fuel the current proliferation of performance measurement in healthcare