Quality Measures Workgroup Seeks Comment on Clinical Quality Measures Concepts for Stage 2 and Stage 3 Meaningful Use

by David Lansky Chair of the Quality Measures Workgroup

The HIT Policy Committee (a federal advisory committee that advises the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services) formed the Quality Measures Workgroup to recommend new clinical quality measures to leverage the evolving health IT infrastructure. The Quality Measures Workgroup is developing recommendations on clinical quality measures for Stage 2 and Stage 3 Meaningful Use. The Workgroup was divided into five tiger teams to focus on the following measure domains: Patient and Family Engagement, Clinical Appropriateness / Efficiency, Care Coordination, Patient Safety, and Population and Public Health.These domains are broadly aligned with the National Priorities Partnership Framework for health quality, and the five pillars of Meaningful Use – improving safety, quality, efficiency, and health disparities; engaging patients and families; improving care coordination; improving population health; and ensuring adequate privacy and security protections.

The tiger teams proposed important measure concepts for each of their domain areas. The teams then presented these recommendations in a report, “Tiger Team’s Summary Report,” which was submitted to the Quality Measures Workgroup on October 28, 2010.

After reviewing the tiger teams’ recommendations, the Workgroup revised and consolidated the measure concepts and now requests public comment on the measure concepts proposed within this document: Measure Concept List [XLS - 28KB]. The Workgroup requests general comments and specific examples of measures for each measure concept that fit the following criteria:

• HIT-sensitive—Capable of being built into electronic health record (EHR) systems with implementation of relevant health IT functions (e.g., clinical decision support) that result in improved outcomes and/or clinical performance.
• Parsimonious—Applies across multiple types of providers, care settings and conditions.
• Demonstrates preventable burden—Supports potential improvements in population health and reduces burden of illness.
• Assesses health risk status and outcomes—Supports assessment of patient health risks that can be used for risk adjusting other measures, and assessing changes in outcomes, including general cross-cutting measures of risk status and functional status and condition-specific measures.
• Longitudinal—Enables assessment of longitudinal, condition-specific, patient-focused episodes of care.

Comments to the workgroup can be submitted at the following link: https://www.altarum.net/survey/qmrfc.aspx .  Comments will be accepted until December 23, 2010. For a more detailed description of each measure concept, please see the following attachment, Measure Concept List – Detailed Descriptions [PDF - 105 KB] .

Your comments will inform the work of the HIT Policy Committee in supporting the development of HIT-sensitive clinical quality measures; these comments are important to shaping public policy on the future of e-measure development. Your responses are greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

David Lansky, Chair

Quality Measures Workgroup