Facilities

Quality Measures & You: Facilities

Whether you are an individual facility or a member of a professional group or association representing facilities, there are many ways in which you can get involved throughout the lifecycle of quality measure development. It is CMS’ responsibility to ensure that meaningful robust clinical quality measures (CQMs) are available for determination of quality and value of clinical care across all settings. To fully support and help realize the intent of the CMS Quality Strategy, it is critical to ensure that the measures developed are meaningful, represent opportunities for improvement in care quality, and differentiate quality in a meaningful and valid way.

Defining Facilities:

Facilities are defined as any provider (e.g., hospital, skilled nursing facility, home health agency, outpatient physical therapy, comprehensive outpatient rehabilitation facility, end-stage renal disease facility, hospice, physician, non-physician provider, laboratory, supplier, etc.) providing medical services to beneficiaries.

Why You Should Get Involved:

Facility input is a key process to ensure that measures developed and maintained are effective for accountability, for quality improvement, and are useful to healthcare providers. It is also critical that the value added by the measure outweighs the burdens of collecting and reporting the data. Ensuring that the collection and reporting fits into the normal workflow will result in better data and, therefore, better decisions.

Ways to Get Involved:

There are many ways to get involved. The first is to take steps to increase your own knowledge and understanding of clinical quality measures: what they are, how they work, how they impact healthcare. That information can all be found on this website for you to explore.

Another way is to be a member of the Technical Expert Panel, or TEP, for a specific measure. A TEP is a group of stakeholders and experts, including healthcare facilities, who provide input to measure developers. TEP members are chosen based on their expertise, personal experience, diversity of perspectives, background, and training. You can see what panels are now being formed on the TEP webpage.

You can also participate in the public comment period for a proposed measure. The public comment period provides an opportunity for interested parties to provide input on the measures under development and to provide critical suggestions not previously considered by the measure developer or by the TEP.

You can attend the CMS Open Door Forums designed to address the concerns and issues of a variety of facility types.