The Myths of Outcomes Management: Implications for Residential Treatment

While the child serving system has been measuring and monitoring outcomes for more than three decades, the promise of actually using outcomes to support changes in the functioning of the system has not yet lived up to its full potential. In this Editorial, I review what I believe to be a number of ways that we have mistakenly conceptualized outcomes. By working through these myths, we can begin to teach the system to learn from its own experiences to better help child and families.