Lynn Scheps is Vice President, Government Affairs at EHR vendor SRSsoft. In this role, Lynn has been a Voice of Physicians and SRSsoft users in Washington during the formulation of the meaningful use criteria. Lynn is currently working to assist SRSsoft users interested in showing meaningful use and receiving the EHR incentive money. Check out Lynn’s previous Meaningful Use Monday posts.
In addition to the Meaningful Use Stage 2 recommendations discussed in last week’s Meaningful Use Monday, the HIT Policy Committee proposed a new framework for the reporting of clinical quality measures that was designed by its specifically-tasked Quality Measure Workgroup. The recommended concept is depicted in the graphic below—the intention is to broaden the scope of reporting to address a wider spectrum of factors affecting care and to accommodate all types of physicians.
Providers would report on some number of the core measures, (between 5 and all 8 or 9 is the recommendation), and at least one measure from each of the 6 menu “domains”. The core quality measure set would include all of the core and alternate core measures from Stage 1 and an additional 2 measures related to care coordination. Interestingly, there was no mention of establishing required thresholds to be met on any of the quality measures.
The intention is that all physicians (including specialists) will find measures relevant to their specialty in the core set as well as in each of the domains. This seems like a tall order from a practical perspective, given the primary-care focus of the Stage 1 quality measures, (particularly true of the core, but also the additional measures.) To accomplish this, the workgroup submitted quite a lengthy “library” of measures to CMS for its consideration—some measures are carried forward from Stage 1, others are recently retooled, and many are still “to be developed”.
We’ll be watching intently to see what CMS does with clinical quality measures, since this is such a fundamental part of meaningful use.
