HIGHLIGHTS
- How can CMS modernize its data collection, analysis and reporting system to monitor and improve the safety and quality of post-acute care, long-term care, and hospice providers?
- With ICF, Abt is advising CMS on calculating quality measures and advancing complex data reporting, dashboarding, and displaying public-reported data.
- These data efforts are reflected across skilled nursing facilities, nursing homes, home health agencies, hospices, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, and long-term care facilities.
PROJECT
Quality Measures Implementation and Reporting (QMIR) Program
The Challenge
Providing quality care to the more than 100 million Americans served under Medicare, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) requires robust data collection and analysis of key measures and indicators. As technology has evolved, data systems built to monitor many of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid’s (CMS) vital programs need to modernize to integrate with new systems while maintaining other legacy ones.
The Approach
To support CMS in this effort, Abt—in partnership with ICF—worked to transition development and maintenance of quality measures and data reports from Quality Improvement and Evaluation System (QIES) into the new, high-value, low-cost, internet-facing iQIES platform while minimizing the impact to providers and stakeholders. These data are important indicators that track providers’ quality of care. Quality measures include a wide variety of quality indicators from structure and care processes to outcome measures from patient assessments, state inspections, and complaints.
Abt also provides subject-matter expertise for CMS quality measurement for home health, skilled nursing facility, nursing home, hospice, inpatient rehabilitation, and long-term care hospital settings. In addition to supporting the measure calculation, Abt is working to ensure that the reporting features are reflective with current CMS policy and program goals, as well as useful for providers, state agencies, CMS and other users.
The Results
To date, the Abt team has supported the successful transition of quality measure calculation and reporting to iQIES for some care settings, including skilled nursing facilities, nursing homes, home health agencies, inpatient rehabilitation facilities, and long-term care facilities. Abt has advised on the deployment of routine updates of quality data for reporting through the iQIES to ensure the accuracy of quality measures calculations and the timely delivery of a variety of reports to providers and relevant stakeholders.