Sorry. Health Care Reform Can ’t Wait for Quality Measures to Be Perfect

By BINDER, MARCOTTE, FILDES and THOMPSON There’s a debate in the United States about whether the current measures of health care quality are adequate to support the movement away from fee-for-service toward value-based payment. Some providers advocate slowing or even halting payment reform efforts because they don’t believe that quality can be adequately measured to determine fair payment. Employers and other purchasers, however, strongly support the currently available quality measures used in payment reform efforts to reward higher-performing providers. So far, the Trump administration has not weighed in. The four of us, leaders of organizations that represent large employers and other purchasers of health care, reject any delay in payment reform efforts for the following three reasons: Even imperfect measurement and transparency accelerate quality improvement. One set of measures often questioned is the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality’s (AHRQ) Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs) used by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and others in value-based payment programs. These indicators measure surgical complications and errors in hospitals, which is critical given that one in four hospital admissions is estimated to result in an adverse event. PSIs remain among the most evidence-based, well-tested, and validated quality measures available. CMS uses many in its value-based purchasing programs. Use and reporting of PSIs through AHRQ’s Med...
Source: The Health Care Blog - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized AHRQ CMS PSI Quality measure value-based care Source Type: blogs