Policy & Regulation News

CMS Report Details Impact of Widespread Quality Measures

By Jacqueline DiChiara

- Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) announces the release of a new CMS report, the 2015 National Impact Assessment of Quality Measures Report, a comprehensive assessment of CMS’ quality measures.

The report employs nine key research questions through trend and descriptive analysis of twenty-five CMS programs and seven hundred quality measures from 2006 to 2013. Quality measures are included in incentive programs associating payment with quality performance. Hospital Value-Based Purchasing Program (Hospital VHB) trends were not accessed because they were considered too new to draw accurate conclusions from until more time has passed.

The report demonstrates CMS’ monumental effort to improve the overall quality of healthcare over a long term period. Throughout the past decade, ACA and the National Quality Strategy (NQS) executed further assessment of discrepancy between high-quality evidence-based care and actual care received by beneficiaries.

The primary priorities included providing engaged, safe, and affordable care via effective communication and coordination, maintaining community collaboration, and promoting successful prevention and treatment practices. CMS frequently aligned its Quality Strategy with the NQS and is perpetually moving toward these outcome measures among various programs.

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  • Achieving three collectively interwoven objectives means an overall healthier county, maintains CMS. The report “demonstrates that the nation has made clear progress in improving the healthcare delivery system to achieve the three aims of better care, smarter spending, and healthier people,” said CMS Deputy Administrator for Innovation and Quality and Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Patrick Conway.

    One primary finding was that CMS enabled a strong public-private collaboration. The report states that measures impact patients well beyond the Medicare population.

    40 percent of CMS quality reporting measures include beneficiaries supported by Medicare. Thirty percent of individuals are supported via additional payer sources.

    An additional key finding is that CMS programs and measures reach a varied range of patients with high-impact conditions, such as cardiovascular disease. CMS reports there are tangible means of assessing these measures’ effectiveness to conclude if they directly address CMS quality and efficiency goals and adequately assess patient-centered outcomes.

    CMS additionally emphasizes a strict overall prioritization of these high-impact conditions. It also advocates for the broad development of widespread, core measures to help address appropriate measure domains.

    Another primary finding is that race and ethnicity disparities evident in 2006 were notably less pronounced than they were in 2012.

    “Measure rates for Hispanics, Blacks and Asians showed the most improvement,” said Dr. Conway.

    This is perhaps in direct contrast to a RevCycleIntelligence.com mention earlier this week of a reportedly prominent divide between patients’ racial and ethnic composition and the varied intensity of care each group requires, according to a KNG Health Consulting report.

    After noticing the appendices for CMS Quality Measures Report allegedly contain mathematical errors, we await commentary from CMS’ Office of Communications.