CMS awards $26.6 million to groups developing quality measures

The CMS has selected seven healthcare organizations to create new quality measures for the Quality Payment Program, awarding them $26.6 million for the work.

The public-private funding agreement, which is the first of its kind for the agency, is part of legislation authorized under the Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 to improve quality measures under Medicare. The agreement also aligns with the CMS' Meaningful Measures initiative to establish new measures that are valuable to patients and clinicians and remove those that aren't.

The CMS awarded the seven organizations a total of $26.6 million over three years to develop the measures. The new measures address six specialties: orthopedic surgery, pathology, radiology, mental health and substance abuse, oncology, and palliative care. The CMS said the measures were selected because they fill gaps in measurement under the Quality Payment Program.

"Through our Meaningful Measures initiative, CMS is committed to advancing measures that minimize burden on clinicians, improve outcomes for patients and drive high-quality care. We need the expertise and firsthand experience of those on the front lines to develop measures that achieve these goals," CMS Administrator Seema Verma said in a statement.

The Pacific Business Group on Health, a not-for-profit organization that represents employers, was granted funding to test a measure that will track patient pain following chemotherapy and another for patients to report quality of life after chemotherapy. The Pacific Business Group has been in the quality measurement development arena since the 1990s.

"We really are emphasizing the importance of patient-reported measures," said David Lansky, CEO of the group.

The work on the measures will begin this fall. Pacific Business Group will test out the measures with various provider partners.

The other six organizations the CMS will work with are Brigham and Women's Hospital, the American Society for Clinical Pathology, the University of California Board of Regents, the American Psychiatric Association, University of Southern California and the American Academy of Hospice and Palliative Medicine.

Under MACRA, the Quality Measure Development Plan was included to develop, improve, update and expand measures used in the Quality Payment Program.

There are more than 400 measures across all Medicare programs. The CMS has removed 105 measures so far this year, which will save providers $178 million over the next three years, according to the agency.