By Kate Goodrich, M.D., M.H.S., Director, CMS Center for Clinical Standards and Quality & CMS Chief Medical Officer
Twitter:Â @CMSgov
CMS is pleased to announce a new funding opportunity for the development, improvement, updating, and expansion of quality measures for use in the Quality Payment Program. CMS will be partnering directly with clinicians, patients, and other stakeholders to provide up to $30 million of funding and technical assistance in development of quality measures over three years.
Cooperative agreements provide a unique opportunity for CMS to partner with external entities, such as clinical specialty societies, clinical professional organizations, patient advocacy organizations, educational institutions, independent research organizations, and health systems, in developing, improving, updating, and expanding quality measures for the Quality Payment Program. By giving external entities needed resources to help guide their measure-development efforts though this funding opportunity, CMS can leverage the unique perspectives and expertise of these external entities, such as clinician and patient perspectives, to advance the Quality Payment Program measure portfolio. The cooperative agreements will allow CMS to collaborate with stakeholders to address essential topics such as: clinician engagement, burden minimization, consumer-informed decisions, critical measure gaps, quality measure alignment, consumer-informed decisions, clinician engagement, and efficient data collection that minimizes health care provider burden.
The priority measures developed, improved, updated or expanded under the cooperative agreements will be aligned with the CMS Quality Measure Development Plan. The CMS Quality Measure Development Plan provides a strategy for filling clinician and specialty area measure gaps and for recommendations to close these gaps in order to support the Quality Payment Program, and identifies the following initial priority areas for measure development: Clinical Care, Safety, Care Coordination, Patient and Caregiver Experience, Population Health and Prevention, and Affordable Care. The gap areas include, but not limited to: Orthopedic Surgery, Pathology, Radiology, Mental Health and substance use conditions, Oncology, Palliative Care, and Emergency Medicine.
More broadly than the CMS Quality Measure Development Plan, which is specific for the Quality Payment Program, CMS measures work is guided by the Meaningful Measurement framework which identifies the highest priorities for quality measurement and improvement. The Meaningful Measure Areas serve as the connectors between CMS goals under development and individual measures/initiatives that demonstrate how high quality outcomes for our Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP beneficiaries are being achieved. They are concrete quality topics which reflect core issues that are most vital to high quality care and better patient outcomes.
Through these cooperative agreements, CMS aims to provide the necessary support to help external entities expand the Quality Payment Program quality measure portfolio with a focus on clinical and patient perspectives and minimizing burden for clinicians. Focusing on patient perspectives will ensure measures focus on what is important to patients and drive the improvement of patient outcomes. To accomplish this, the cooperative agreements prioritize the development of: outcome measures, including patient reported outcome and functional status measures; patient experience measures; care coordination measures; and measures of appropriate use of services, including measures of overuse.
For more information, search for the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 (MACRA) Funding Opportunity: Measure Development for the Quality Payment Program on Grants.gov or visit our website.
This article was originally published on The CMS Blog and is republished here with permission.