According to the Wall Street Journal, providers submit data on 1,675 quality measures for 33 federal programs.
“Measurement fatigue is a real problem in hospitals,” Scott Wallace, a professor with Dartmouth’s Geisel School of Medicine, told the WSJ. “But, to me, the only metric that matters is, did you get better?”
The National Quality Forum has weighed in on the topic by submitting recommendations on performance measures for 20 HHS programs. The proposals would make measures in various programs more aligned. Additionally, the NQF would like to see narrow metrics replaced with more general ones, according to the WSJ.
Earlier this year, the American Hospital Association laid out 11 quality measure priorities in a letter to the Measure Applications Partnership in hopes to start a conversation on a more “focused approach” to quality measurement.
A CMS official acknowledged that the agency is looking to change quality metrics to ones that “matter most to patients and clinicians,” according to the WSJ.
Read more about HHS’ announcement here.
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