Transforming Health Care Quality Measurement and Reporting

There are upwards of 6,000 quality measures in health care today, costing the health system an estimated $15.4 billion annually in physician reporting. Among those are many siloed quality improvement efforts system-wide, but no standardized defined set of measures or primary data sets that identify the quality of an individual clinician or a facility. The significant increase in quality measures speaks to the growth of quality improvement efforts over the past decade. Despite these efforts, the health outcomes and quality of care associated with these many quality measures has not improved nearly at the same rate of increase as the resources pumped into the system to develop, collect, and report metrics. Medical errors remains the third-leading cause of death in the United States, indicating that the nation is not nearly where it needs to be in terms of health care quality.