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How is your hospital, healthcare system, or clinic measuring up to national standards? Are your patients receiving proper and timely care? For many small and rural systems, these are difficult questions to answer without proper (and often third-party) support.
In late 2017, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) introduced the Meaningful Measures initiative, with a goal to improve the delivery of care while also reducing costs for both patients and providers through the culling and prioritizing of existing quality measures. Part of this initiative aimed to reduce the burden of reporting for providers. For large hospitals in urban settings, it is likely there are employees whose roles are dedicated to the encumbrance of quality reporting. When new quality initiatives come down the pike, adjusting priorities may take some time, but these teams are largely equipped to handle it. For smaller clinics, measuring success—let alone demonstrating it—under complex and shifting quality standards is a huge challenge. Small clinics are also less likely to have adequate health information technology, which adds another layer of difficulty. There are several options that should be considered as small providers look to improve their quality performance.