Psychiatrists probably are not so unusual among health care professionals in their desire to measure things. But compared to practitioners in most other areas of medicine, they may be the newest entrants to the world of the quantitative versus qualitative. Measurement-based care (MBC) and laboratory testing have become increasing focal points of clinical practice. Perhaps this comes in response to decades (if not centuries) of an often impressionistic and sometimes sluggishly qualitative way of recording clinical observations; perhaps it is backlash against a psychoanalytic heritage that for too long eschewed quantitative measures and formal outcome tracking; it also reflects the promulgation of research tools (semi-structured interviews, questionnaires, rating scales) into nonresearch clinical settings; and no doubt, MBC has arisen in response to a health care system that has come to link service reimbursement with quantifiable parameters.