The healthcare community is strongly supportive of performance measures to further improve care quality, but remains wary because they want to be tracked in a “fair and transparent way by measures that provide useful information for consumers and for quality improvement,” Marybeth Farquhar, PhD, MSN, RN, and URAC’s vice president of quality, research, & measurement, told attendees of a recent webinar, “The Politics of Performance Measurement.”
Robust measurement and accreditation programs are key components of a successful telehealth program, leading experts say.
“There shouldn’t be any difference between a quality telehealth visit” and a traditional in-office doctor visit, says Marybeth Farquhar, vice president, quality, research and measurement, URAC.
Change is a part of every quality improvement initiative, and leadership is essential to the endeavor. Thought leader Don Berwick, M.D. stated that the failure to move the quality agenda forward was due to the failure of leadership and the inability of medical administrators and the professional workforce to innovate (Galvin, 2005).
As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Healthcare is no exception. Quality and accountability are two buzzwords that began in the latter half of the 2000s and intensified with the passage of the Accountable Care Act in 2010.
The drive toward value-based care is requiring the healthcare industry to make a 180-degree turn from where we were just a few years ago. We’re moving away from a system focused on treating sickness to one that strives for wellness; from encouraging volume to demanding value; from filling beds to penalizing readmissions; and finally, from a system centered on the provider to one that rightfully revolves around the patient.
Healthcare ranking systems intended to measure quality of care can garner mixed reviews among providers. While many critics point to flaws in how such systems are structured, organizations like URAC are focusing on approaches to quality measurement that may be more reflective of provider performance.
“Ranking systems are heavily weighted toward process measures,” says Marybeth Farquhar, URAC’s Vice President of Quality, Research and Measurement. “Many of the measures that contribute to a ranking are basically indicating that a task has been completed, rather than looking at patient outcomes that resulted from that task.”
