NQMC - Resources - Expert Commentary

Hospital Process Measures: Only One Piece of the Quality Improvement Puzzle
By: Rachel M. Werner, MD, PhD

Although hospital quality has improved over the past decades, (1,2) it remains uneven and often inadequate. (3) Too often patients do not receive potentially life-saving treatments, such as aspirin when admitted for a heart attack or angiotensin-converting enzyme (ACE) inhibitor after hospitalization for heart failure. The omission of proven therapies is often cited as evidence of inadequate hospital quality that may lead to preventable deaths.

In response to these quality deficits, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), along with other health care organizations, participate in the Hospital Quality Alliance, a large scale public-private collaboration that seeks to make performance information on all acute care non-federal hospitals accessible to the public, payers, and providers of care. (4) At the time of its inception, the performance measures used by Hospital Quality Alliance evaluated hospital quality on processes of care for patients with common conditions, including acute myocardial infarction, heart failure, and pneumonia. In April 2005, the CMS began publishing hospital performance and rankings based on these measures on their website, "Hospital Compare" (http://www.hospitalcompare.hhs.gov/).

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NQMC - Resources - Expert Commentary