The National Partnership for Women & Families (@NPWF), which has worked for 45 years to improve health for women and families, applauded the unprecedented work to align quality measurement across health care payers – including commercial plans, Medicare and Medicaid – for its promise to drive better care and better use of health care resources. The Core Quality Measures Collaborative, a multi-stakeholder group, announced the alignment, along with seven core health care quality measure sets that support it, today.
“Our health care system urgently needs measurement that drives improvements in quality, supports informed consumer decision-making and ensures we’re paying for and incentivizing high-value care. What we released today is a start at achieving consensus on the best measures, but we need to continue pushing for even better ones,” said Debra L. Ness, president of the National Partnership. “We need measurement that works for clinicians and helps them improve care, while also providing information that is meaningful and actionable for patients and families. Alignment across payers is key to making sure measurement doesn’t waste resources or create unnecessary burden. Ultimately, it plays a foundational role in achieving better health and better health care at lower costs.”
“The Collaborative’s work thus far is an important step in getting to a health care system that is more responsive to what patients and families need and want, and the collaboration among diverse stakeholders reinforces what we already know: consumers, clinicians and payers have a shared interest in reducing burden and waste in our health care system,” added Carol Sakala, director of Childbirth Connection programs at the National Partnership and a member of the Collaborative’s Patient Reported Outcomes/Experience of Care Work Group. “We look forward to continuing a collaborative, transparent process as we work to build consensus and alignment for high-impact, high-value quality measurement.”
The Collaborative will add additional measure sets over time, and update the measure sets as better measures become available. More information on the Core Quality Measures Collaborative – including the new core measure sets for accountable care organizations/patient-centered medical homes/primary care, cardiology, gastroenterology, HIV/Hepatitis C, medical oncology, orthopedics and obstetrics and gynecology – is available here.