“With so much focus on quality, the resource burden on healthcare providers of taking and reporting measures for multiple agencies and payors is significant,” they wrote. To facilitate the quality reporting process, harmonizing quality measures will be critical, and with the growing emergency of electronic health records, it will also be important to standardize data sets to enable interoperability, sharing of data and reporting, they added.
The authors suggested the creation of data intermediaries. “These organizations could import data from disparate sources from providers, calculate quality measures, and then feed the results back to the provider for quality improvement and to the relevant third parties,” they wrote. The Physician Quality Reporting System currently has a similar feedback loop, but the process can take 18 months, which can hamper rapid quality improvement.
Related Articles on Quality Measures:
Admission Health Status Should Be Accounted For in New Payment, Incentive Models
Study: Small Hospitals Less Likely to Provide Full Heart Failure Care
NQF Endorses Quality Measures on Palliative and End-of-Life Care
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