Last year, the Kentuckiana Health Collaborative partnered with Kentucky Department for Medicaid Services to form the Kentucky Performance Measures Alignment Committee (PMAC), a public-private partnership with the goal of creating a core measures set for Kentucky stakeholders to align to. The goals of the core healthcare measurement set are to establish broadly agreed upon priority quality measures that improve the quality and value of care, reduce provider reporting complexity, and align Kentucky’s healthcare organizations to focus on key indicators of quality healthcare in the Commonwealth. The final measures chosen will be included on a core healthcare measures set. Ultimately, the expectation is for the measure set to be adopted by public and private organizations to better focus improvement efforts toward shared areas.
Today, a draft of the core measures set, the Kentucky Core Healthcare Measures Set (KCHMS), is available for public feedback. This public comment period will end on May 24, 2018.
PMAC consists of a large oversight committee and four subcommittees dedicated to areas of primary care and pediatric care: Preventive Care, Pediatric Care, Chronic and Acute Care, and Behavioral Health Care. Subcommittees have spent the last several months creating recommended sets of measures in their area of focus. The result is a measures set with 38 unique measures.
Of those 38 measures in the recommended set, 24 are defined as high priority. The committees found high priority measures to be strong predictors of quality care and reflect priority conditions for Kentucky. These measures had very strong consensus for adoption, and often there was additional enthusiasm from the group around these measures. Standard measures are also important, but they are not elevated to the level of high priority because of either being smaller predictors of quality care, data availability challenges, or lack of provider focus in that area.
There were a few themes that we saw throughout the committees, particularly around behavioral health, BMI, and chronic conditions. For example, behavioral health and preventive health teams both selected the same tobacco screening and cessation measure, and the pediatric group also selected a tobacco screening and cessation measure directed specifically at adolescents. Although the chronic care team didn’t review tobacco measures, they made it clear that tobacco use has a large impact on chronic conditions and asked the other subcommittees to make that a priority in their selection. The behavioral health team selected depression screening and follow up (NQF #418, a CMS measure), and the pediatric group selected as a future area of development a new HEDIS depression screening and follow up measure that was also based on the CMS measure that the behavioral health group chose.
The large PMAC oversight committee has begun to work with these recommendations to create a final set of measures, which will include weighing the opinions, suggestions, and comments resulting from the public comment period. If you are a healthcare stakeholder in Kentucky, please download and review the draft KCHMS on the KHC website here, and fill out an online form to submit your comments.
Please email any questions to sclouser@khcollaborative.org.
