The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) recently sought input on the metrics used in pay-for-performance financial arrangements, with 97 reporting requirement adjustments up for review.
Each year, CMS publishes a list of quality and cost measures that are under consideration for Medicare quality and value-based purchasing programs. This year, 39% were outcomes measures.
“CMS is considering new measures for nursing homes, hospitals, clinician practices, and dialysis facilities, among other settings, and continues to focus on important measures of patient outcomes, appropriate use of diagnostics and services, cost, and patient safety,” the agency said in a recent blog post. “We are committed to working with patients, clinicians and others on how to best measure the quality and value of care while reducing burden on providers and driving improved outcomes for patients at lower costs.”
Items related to skilled care on this year’s list include falls prevention, pressure ulcers, pain management, opioids, and hospice care. The list is prepared with the National Quality Forum (NQF), as part of the Measure Applications Partnership (MAP).
Today, there are clinical decision support (CDS) systems that target a few of the proposed measures, including pressure ulcer and falls prevention, as well as medication management. The OnTime Quality initiative at the Administration for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), for example, funded the development of implementation guides for long-term and post acute (LTPAC) electronic health record (EHR) vendors to embed such tools into their product offering.
“Many of today’s LTPAC EHRs have implemented and incorporated CDS systems that can target and address a few of these clinical outcome measures,” said CAST Executive Director Majd Alwan, PhD, highlighting the importance of using such advanced technology tools to improve quality in health care. Please see CAST’s EHR Planning and Selection Tool for more information.
Next, NQF will convene the multi-stakeholder groups from the public on behalf of and for consideration by the Measure Applications Partnership (MAP) to review and provide input on which measures are most suitable for Medicare’s quality and value-based purchasing programs. The MAP will give program-specific recommendations to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services by Feb. 1, 2017.
See the full list of measures under consideration and comments received.