Developing Care Quality Metrics to Benefit Providers, Patients
To design care quality measures that improve the provider and patient experience, healthcare organizations must develop these measures alongside clinicians.
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By Jessica Kent
- With the healthcare system increasingly moving toward value-based care, care quality metrics are becoming an essential part of effective care delivery.
However, some health systems may struggle to develop quality measures that work to benefit both providers and patients.
In a recent episode of Healthcare Strategies, Anthony Romeo, MD, an orthopedic surgeon and chief medical editor of Orthopedics Today discussed why healthcare organizations should work alongside providers to develop successful care quality measures, as well as how entities can do this effectively.
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“Measuring the quality of physician care is so critical because the value of healthcare is the quality divided by the cost. And quite honestly, we haven't had very good measures of the quality in terms of the individual physician, so then it all comes down to cost. And that's a very frustrating environment to be in,” said Romeo.
“Reducing physician reimbursement, creating more strict guidelines in terms of staffing, and other models are putting additional pressure on physicians. The result is that burnout among physicians is the highest it's ever been and getting worse. The solution should be to create a better work environment for providers. Those solutions should be driven by physician leadership. And to make sure that they're done correctly, it should be done on our quality measures.”
Leveraging data and technology will be an essential part of measuring the quality of physician care, Romeo noted.
“There are a number of ways that we not only should, but have to do this. When you look at the healthcare dollar, 80 percent of the way money is spent is based on physician behavior. As we go forward in this process toward true value-based care, we have to do a much better job of monitoring each and every physician who participates in the process,” he said.
“When a system is set up so that there’s a collaboration between your peers and you're getting benchmarked against others, it improves everyone's understanding of the process and it drives a higher level of care. But if you have a population health pool of revenue that you have to manage, you have to be able to interpret, understand, and modify the behavior of the physicians that are within your system.”
Ultimately, physician leaders will be key to managing quality of care data and carrying out behavioral and performance changes within an organization.
“We can't just look at adverse outcomes and say, ‘This is terrible, we're going to stop this.’ We have to say, ‘This is the problem. How do we remedy that? How do we develop more evidence to make sure that we're continuing to improve the quality of the care that we're providing to a population of patients?’” said Romeo.
“But we have to do that patient by patient and physician by physician, which has really not been done well up to now.”
