CMS to public: What's "quality"?

“Do health insurance issuers monitor patient safety statistics, such as hospital acquired conditions and mortality outcomes, and if so, how?” CMS officials ask.

In a section on setting up quality programs for a health insurance exchange system, officials ask for ideas about which quality measures or measure sets are most relevant to the exchange marketplace, and whether there are any gaps in clinical measure sets that could create challenges for capturing experience in the exchange system.

Officials also ask about how an exchange should display a plan’s quality improvement information, and whether the approach a PPACA exchange uses should be different from the approach the Medicare Advantage program now uses to report “star rating” data.

“What are effective ways to display quality ratings that would be meaningful for exchange consumers and small employers, especially drawing on lessons learned from public reporting and transparency efforts that states and private entities use to display health care quality information?” officials ask.

Answers to the questions will be due 30 days after the official Federal Register publication date.

See also:

• PPACA rate, wellness and benefits proposals roll out
• Medicare quality program grows teeth
• GAO: Kill Medicare Advantage Quality Bonuses