Are you leaving money on the table because you missed a quality measure? Tool for success: CQM Prioritization Tool

BJ D. – Practice Facilitator, CPC+ Eastern Colorado Region

Jennifer Boaz, MHA, BSN, RN, PCMH CCE
Healthcare Learning Faculty and Clinical Health Information Technology Advisor

Jennifer Miller
Healthcare Learning Faculty

To prepare for the shift to pay-for-performance, many primary care practices are participating in formal quality improvement initiatives. Each of these initiatives requires clinical quality measure reporting. Many payers require reporting on selected clinical quality measures too. Practices are reporting burnout associated with these increased demands and limited resources. A solution to alleviate some of the burden is by proactively identifying overlap in CQMs.

HealthTeamWorks^® has developed a CQM Prioritization Tool to help practices align this work, strategically prioritize and focus their quality improvement efforts. This is intended to be a flexible tool so that you can efficiently evaluate your clinical quality measures so that you are identifying and prioritizing opportunities, looking at current state, and seeing if it is where you want to be.

This worksheet includes selected measures for common initiatives.

To customize this document to reflect an individual clinic’s reporting, please complete the following.

• Column J populate with your largest non-Medicare Payer, select the measures used by that payer to rate performance.
• Column K populate with your second largest non-Medicare Payer, select the measures used by that payer to rate performance.
• You may insert additional columns to reflect more payers or an ACO that you participate in.
• You may delete columns of initiatives that you are not involved with, but keeping all the initiatives show regional priorities for measures.
• The far-right column is the total number of initiative, payers, or ACOs that are focusing on that specific CQM.
• Practices are encouraged to add columns for thresholds and/or current performance to establish baseline state.

This concrete alignment and prioritization helps practices focus you improvement work.

Interested in similar tools? This is just one example of what is offered in the Solutions Center, Your Go-To for How-To. We are currently offering trial memberships to our clients and partners. Click here to learn more.