The healthcare sector has repeatedly drawn attention to the fact that a variety of quality measure sets exist, oftentimes requiring duplicative reporting, and generating confusion among the consumers they are intended to help.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced that it would convene a summit to streamline HHS’ quality programs. Specifically, HHS will look at ways to re-align quality measures from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, among others. The goal is to merge some measures and delete ones that have become outdated. President Trump issued an executive order on June 24 giving federal agencies 180 days to create a new quality roadmap.
Aside from the federal measures, hospitals also report quality metrics to state agencies, health insurance companies, and independent groups. Last Wednesday, the Massachusetts Executive Office of Health and Human Services (EOHHS) announced it is expanding the term of the Quality Measurement Taskforce it created in 2017 to recommend an aligned measure set for voluntary adoption by payers and providers in global budget-based risk contracts. The task force will now operate until May 2021, and anyone wishing to serve on it has until July 22 to submit a nomination.
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