The term scorecards is sometimes used to refer to health-indicator sets that provide a snapshot of an area’s health (for example, How is X County compared with a national standard, compared with Y County in a given state, or compared with last year?). However, the term’s specific meaning in the business, education, and clinical care settings—as a tool for internal performance evaluation (for example, balanced scorecards)—is different from the meaning and purpose of many health-indicator sets. The committee struggled with achieving clarity about the seemingly overlapping meanings of the terms used in measurement and recognized that the purposes of performance measurement, public reporting, and mobilization are not necessarily independent or neatly separate from one another. The lack of semantic exactness regarding health indicators has led to a conflation of two primary meanings: “measures of health” and “measures of performance on health.” Many public health or population health data sets (as opposed to data sets used in the clinical care context) called scorecards or report cards are not, in fact, intended for or capable of measuring the performance of public health agencies in a county or state, of other organizations, or of communities in general. The committee discusses this difficulty with use of the term scorecard further in Chapter 4, “Measurement and Accountability.”