Development of Kidney Care Quality Measures
The Kidney Community has launched a major, multi-year quality initiative that focuses on developing facility-level quality measures that will drive quality improvement and have greater impact on patient clinical outcomes than existing measures included in Medicare’s current value-based purchasing program, the Quality Incentive Program (QIP), and Dialysis Facility Compare. These measures focus on those aspects of treatment that will reduce mortality and hospitalizations and as a result enhance health-related quality of life. Patients, nephrologists, and researchers have identified these areas as critically important for improving the lives of dialysis patients and reducing overall Medicare expenditures for this patient population.
The community’s latest initiative builds upon the 2014 release of the community’s comprehensive Quality Blueprint entitled “A Strategic Blueprint for Advancing Kidney Care Quality,” which identified the most important areas that drive quality of care. From this list, the Kidney Care Quality Alliance (KCQA), which includes patients, researchers, clinicians, and other stakeholders throughout the kidney care community, prioritized 31 quality areas for measure development that they believe would improve patient outcomes and reduce Medicare costs.
LEARN MORE about KCP’s development and comments on kidney care quality measures: