What are quality measures in healthcare? | IBM

Creating quality measures in health care is the practice of using data to assess hospital and health systems performance based on various quality standards. Quality standards are benchmarks that help healthcare organizations measure resource utilization to support improvement and collaborative efforts with objective, fact-based information. There are many types of quality measures that evaluate care for everything from inpatient facilities to imaging facilities to outpatient clinics to entire hospital systems.

Quality measures can be established by a particular healthcare institution or they can can rely on measure specifications or accreditations developed by government agencies, private nonprofits as well as some for-profit companies. Once a healthcare organization sets its quality goals for patient care and other processes, it then develops strategies to meet or exceed those goals. Quality measures can include the organization’s ability to provide effective, safe, timely, patient-focused and equitable care.

While healthcare organizations may have quality measures specific to their institution, outcome measures are generally established by large third-party organizations, such the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), the National Association for Healthcare Quality (NAHQ) or the National Quality Forum (NQF).

Healthcare institutions may decide to exceed mandated quality measures to not only benefit patients’ quality of care and healthcare delivery, but to help with an institution’s marketing and contracting efforts.