Quality Measurement

Our ongoing work with CMS includes new measure development, research on hospital quality including evaluation of trends, disparities and geographic variation and communications with stakeholders about hospital quality, and potential expansion of outcome measurement to include patient-reported outcomes other health care settings.

CORE has developed more than 20 hospital-based outcome measures for national use. As of July, 2013, CMS will report nine of these outcome measures on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ website, Hospital Compare. These measures assess quality through risk-standardized outcome rates. The publicly reported measures assess the following patient cohorts and outcomes:

• Acute myocardial infarction mortality and readmission
  
• Heart failure mortality and readmission
• Pneumonia mortality and readmission
• Elective hip or knee replacement complication and readmission
  
• Hospital-wide readmission rates
  

The aims of publicly reporting these measures are to provide information to consumers and to encourage hospitals to evaluate and improve the quality of patient care. The publicly reported measures comply with standards for publicly reported outcomes models set forth by the American Heart Association and the American College of Cardiology and endorsed by the National Quality Forum. Factsheets, FAQs, measure methodology reports, and published literature on these publicly reported readmission, mortality, and complication measures are located on QualityNet.

With a focus on improving patient quality of life and lowering Medicare costs, our team has also developed or is currently developing the following hospital measures:

• Stroke mortality and readmission
• Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease mortality and readmission
  
• Vascular readmission
  
• Acute myocardial infarction mortality electronic health record measure
  
• Coronary artery bypass graft mortality and readmission
• Patient-reported functional status following total hip/knee arthroplasty
• Acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, and pneumonia episode of care payment measures
  
• Ambulatory care outcome measures for outpatient procedures and chronic disease primary care
  

We provide input on a number of dynamic, wide-ranging activities to inform CMS future directions in outcomes measurement, including identifying strategies to meet quality measure requirements in the Affordable Care Act and developing an annual Chartbook assessing hospital progress on outcomes measures, disparities, trends, and regional variation.