NCQA Launches Initiative to Measure Person-Driven Outcomes

Trying to propel the U.S. health care system beyond measuring good technical quality of care, the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) is launching a $2.1 million initiative to measure person-centered outcomes.

"The future of quality will be more outcomes-oriented," says Bruce Chernof, M.D., president and CEO of the SCAN Foundation — which, together with The John A. Hartford Foundation, is funding NCQA's ambitious project. "These quality metrics really are going to underpin how we think about measuring quality in a value-based purchasing environment."

NCQA's demonstration, called the Person-Driven Outcomes Measures Project, is focusing on older adults with complex care needs. NCQA-developed approaches will be used to collect outcomes through a combination of person-reported outcome measures that will frame goal parameters, track progress and perhaps revise goals over time.

The quality initiative will run over the next three years. Information is being collected by case managers in the demo’s first year using a digital application and via a web portal — generating reports for patients and providers, along with summaries for the medical record.

Overall, NCQA says the demo will include 800-plus participants and roughly 30 clinicians across four organizations, including Medstar Good Samaritan Hospital Center in Baltimore, Priority Health in Grand Rapids, Mich., Kaiser Permanente Northwest in Portland, Ore., and Community Health Plan of Washington.

"We do hope the application could be used more broadly as a clinical tool to help improve care," says Erin Giovannetti, the project's principal investigator and a senior research scientist at NCQA. "In the future we hope the quality measures that we calculate from using this approach…will become part of NCQA's evaluation products which could include HEDIS [Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set] or PCMH [Patient-Centered Medical Home] or another evaluation program."

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