Overview

There is a great demand today for accurate, useful information on health care quality that can inform the decisions of consumers, employers, physicians and other clinicians, and policymakers. This is increasingly important as the health care system moves towards value-based reimbursement models.

It is difficult to have actionable and useful information because physicians and other clinicians must currently report multiple quality measures to different entities.  Measure requirements are often not aligned among payers, which has resulted in confusion and complexity for reporting providers.

To address this problem, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS), commercial plans, Medicare and Medicaid managed care plans, purchasers, physician and other care provider organizations, and consumers worked together through the Core Quality Measures Collaborative to identify core sets of quality measures that payers have committed to using for reporting as soon as feasible.  The guiding principles used by the Collaborative in developing the core measure sets are that they be meaningful to patients, consumers, and physicians, while reducing variability in measure selection, collection burden, and cost. The goal is to establish broadly agreed upon core measure sets that could be harmonized across both commercial and government payers.

https://www.cms.gov/Medicare/Quality-Initiatives-Patient-Assessment-Instruments/QualityMeasures/Core-Measures.html