Quality Measurement and Patient Safety

Current performance measurement approaches too often don’t align with patient and family needs, preferences, and values. When this happens, organizations run the risk of providing information that patients do not find relevant or useful.

Healthcare organizations also can overlook ways to drive quality and safety improvements that matter to patients. Ultimately, to reorient the healthcare system to center on patients, quality and performance measurement must reflect what matters to patients, families, clinicians and payers.
 

Our Work

As a longtime leader in quality and performance measurement, AIR supports payers, purchasers and providers in developing and deploying quality improvement tools that reward greater value and equity rather than higher volume. We provide end-to-end measure development services to support clients, building on our seminal work in developing patient-centered outcome and performance measures over the last decade. An example of AIR’s expertise across the full measure development lifecycle is the CAHPS Home- and Community-Based Services (HCBS CAHPS) Survey, which elicits feedback from Medicaid enrollees about the quality of the long-term services and supports they receive in the community. And in partnership with the Mayo Clinic, AIR developed the CAHPS Cancer Care Survey for AHRQ, which assesses the experiences of adult patients with cancer treatment provided in outpatient and inpatient settings, including independent community oncology practices, cancer centers at community hospitals, and cancer centers at academic medical centers.

AIR’s measure specification, testing, implementation and maintenance work for the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, Agency for Health care Research and Quality, the American Society of Nephrology, and the National Institutes of Health includes the following patient-reported measures:

Additionally, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, AIR has developed two sets of measurement principles. First, the Principles for Making Health Care Measurement Patient-Centered in real-world settings offer a vision of measurement that is patient-driven, holistic, transparent, comprehensible and timely, and co-created with patients. Second, the principles for shared measurement (PDF) show how community members, system leaders, service providers, and policymakers actively engaged in cross-systems efforts can use shared measurement as a tool to align decisions, policies, and practices toward equitable health and well-being.

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Institute Fellow
Principal Researcher