A newly released report from CMS shows health care providers participating in 25 CMS reporting programs across the country, including home health agencies, have improved performance on quality measures from 2006 to 2013.
 
The report, dubbed the 2015 National Impact Assessment of the CMS Quality Measures Report (2015 Impact Report), is a comprehensive evaluation of the effects of the measures used in CMS quality reporting programs on achieving the goals of providing high quality, affordable healthcare to CMS beneficiaries.
 
The first such report was released in 2012. It is mandated through the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to be completed by CMS at least once every three years.
Aside from summarizing CMS quality measurement efforts, the report recommends next steps to improve on these efforts.
 
Among other findings, the report demonstrates that 95% of 119 publicly reported performance rates across seven quality reporting programs improved. About 35% of the 119 measures are classified as high-performing, meaning performance rates exceed 90% in the most recent three years for which data is available.
 
Specific home health measures are not discussed in the report, but the general quality measure domains are addressed include: Patient safety, patient engagement, effective treatment, care coordination, population and public health and affordable care.
 
Process measures are most likely to be high-performing, suggesting these measures are more sensitive to provider quality improvement efforts than outcome measures, the report notes. Few clinical measures that address clinical outcomes are high performing, though most show consistent improvement over the study period.
 
As a result, the federal Medicare agency may consider reserving the development of process measures to those processes of care that link directly to patient outcomes and in which significant performance variability exists across providers, CMS says.
 
The federal Medicare agency also plans to develop more outcome measures, including patient-reported outcomes, since process measures are not uniformly achieving better health outcomes.
 
Race and ethnicity disparities present in 2006 were less present in 2012, the report shows. Measure rates for Hispanics, blacks and Asians showed the most improvements, while those for American Indian/Native Alaskans and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders had the least improvement, CMS says. Eliminating racial and ethnic disparities remains a top priority with CMS’ quality improvement strategy. 
 
Related link: Find the entire report at http://tinyurl.com/m54xh6x.