I can totally understand your sentiment. I would just note that writing a unit test for a class and designing a metric that unambiguously measures good clinical care are on very different levels of difficulty. In our research group, we've tried to do some of the latter regarding infection control, and there is definitely a tradeoff between making metrics explainable in plain language (allowing mental buy-in by healthcare workers) and measuring attributable differences in performance, which usually requires a heap of tricky statistical corrections that few people can grok.

It would be a very interesting future where healthcare workers have the reams of stats that professional athletes do, and where everybody in the space is literate enough to intuitively understand each number and its caveats, like hardcore sports fans. For example, an ICU nurse is bound to encounter more hospital-acquired infections (HAIs) per week than a nurse in pre-op assessment, and so averaged cases of HAI per primary unit is the proper context for that stat, much like you'd weigh recent rushing yards for an NFL linebacker against the strength of the defenses faced. Then, managers could optimize their teams to each person's strength or weakness and/or supply training in the correct areas, much like coaches in sports do. This would be a sea change in the medical culture, though, and it would encounter staunch resistance, because some of the metrics already being pushed on doctors (# pts/day) arguably incentivize worse care.

To your last point, part of my research now is analyzing electronic medical record (EMR) data, and coming from any other field you'd be shocked at how messy it can be. In a way, this is to be expected, because the "vocabularies" for medical data are huge, and even widely used ontologies have bizarre properties [1]. I really hope that we can solve the data collection problems with better technology, but as of now, the incentives for EMR vendors to overhaul the tech is pretty low, now that most US hospitals have picked a system and those vendors have everything to lose and little to gain from overhauling their user interface.

[1]: http://www.healthcaredive.com/news/the-16-most-absurd-icd-10...