AHRQ, CMS Award $13 Million to Test, Implement New Children’s Quality Measures

AHRQ and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services announced awards totaling $13.4 million in funding over four years to six Pediatric Quality Measures Program (PQMP) grantees focused on implementing new measures developed by the PQMP Centers of Excellence. The grantees will focus on assessing the feasibility and usability of the new measures within the Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Programs (CHIP) patient populations at the state, health plan and provider levels to support performance monitoring and quality improvement. “The ultimate goal for this research is to improve children’s health through better health care, at lower costs, at both the federal and state level,” said AHRQ Director Andy Bindman, M.D. Quality measures are used to evaluate or quantify specific health care processes, outcomes, patient perceptions or other factors related to health care delivery. Access our press release to learn more.

Quality Measures
List of children's health care quality measures from the AHRQ-CMS Pediatric Quality Measures Program, including links to brief measure fact sheets, full reports, and other supporting materials.

Pediatric Quality Measures Program

Background

Together, Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) serve more than 43 million children annually, representing more than 1 in 3 children in the United States. Medicaid/CHIP play a key role in ensuring that low-income children get health care coverage, access to a comprehensive set of benefits, and other medically necessary services. The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is working closely with States, health plans, and providers to ensure a high-quality system of care for children in Medicaid/CHIP.

The AHRQ-CMS Pediatric Quality Measures Program (PQMP) is a central component of the overall HHS strategy for implementing Public Law 111-3, the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act of 2009 (CHIPRA), to support State Medicaid/CHIP agencies in collecting and reporting on a core set of standardized child health quality measures (“Initial Core Set” now called the “Child Core Set”) in alignment with other quality measures collected by States, health plans, and providers. The primary goal for Child Core Set—and, more broadly, the implementation of pediatric quality measures—is to achieve better care, a healthier population, and affordable care as identified in the HHS National Strategy for Quality Improvement in Health Care.

As identified in CHIPRA Title IV, Sec. 401, the PQMP was established to increase the portfolio of evidence-based, consensus pediatric quality measures available to public and private purchasers of children's health care services.

Purpose

The initial phase of the PQMP focused on developing new and enhanced pediatric measures to improve children’s quality of care through cooperative agreement grants with the seven PQMP-Centers of Excellence (COEs). Measures were developed by the Centers across diverse areas (including perinatal care, child clinical preventive services, and management of chronic and acute conditions).

A new phase of the PQMP builds on the work previously completed in the initial phase, with a shift in focus to disseminating and implementing the PQMP-COE measures. More specifically, the new phase of work will focus on assessing the feasibility and usability of the newly developed PQMP-COE measures at the State, health plan, and provider levels. Overall, this effort will build knowledge and evidence to support performance monitoring and QI for children in Medicaid/CHIP by increasing the number of new measures being implemented and reported at multiple levels (State, health plan, and provider) in key gap areas; informing efforts to streamline data collection and reporting processes; and supporting States to drive improvement in health care quality using the Child Core Measures and the PQMP-COE measures. The new initiative is funded through Public Law 114-10 (The Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 Section 304(b)) and was launched in October 2016.

PQMP Dissemination and Implementation of Child Health Quality Measures Cooperative Research Grants—New Grantee Information

On October 3, 2016, AHRQ and CMS announced awards totaling $13.4 million (allocated over 4 years) to the six grantees listed below.

Principal Investigator (P.I.)	P.I. Institution
Michael D. Cabana	University of California, San Francisco
Gary L. Freed	University of Michigan
Rita Mangione-Smith	Seattle Children's Hospital
Sarah H. Scholle	National Committee for Quality Assurance
Mark A. Schuster	Boston Children's Hospital
Elizabeth A. Shenkman	University of Florida

Page last reviewed October 2016

Internet Citation: Pediatric Quality Measures Program. Content last reviewed October 2016. Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality, Rockville, MD. http://www.ahrq.gov/policymakers/chipra/pqmp.html