Looking for a few good family doctors to help improve a quality measure
By Shari Glickman, MSSW, PMP
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has contracted with Mathematica Policy Research to recruit provider practices to help test an electronic clinical quality measure, or eCQM. The measure title is “Documentation of a Health Care Partner for Patients with Dementia or Mild Cognitive Impairment.”
The measure requires that a patient’s health care surrogate or partner’s contact information (email address and/or phone number) be documented in structured fields of the electronic health record or electronic medical record. Testing activities include practice staff — clinicians and practice managers — speaking with the Mathematica team about the practices’ workflows and the data elements they capture in their EHRs. We also ask practices to submit an extract of de-identified patient-level data from the EHR for analysis, including the data elements required for the eCQM, such as a health care surrogate or partner’s contact information. Finally, we ask practices to permit trained chart abstractors to review the data elements in a sample of patient charts.
Practices will receive feedback from Mathematica about their data, including rates of documentation of surrogate or health care partner contact information for patients with dementia or mild cognitive impairment. We will not identify test sites when the results of the data analyses are reported to CMS. In addition, none of the testing activities involve an audit of the practices’ performance scores reported to CMS quality reporting programs. Honoraria will range from $3,000 to $6,000, depending on the practices’ level of testing participation.
If you are interested in assisting with this activity, please contact Shari Glickman at SGlickman@mathematica-mpr.com for more information and a detailed fact sheet.
Shari Glickman, MSSW, PMP is a principal program analyst at Mathematica Policy Research, Inc. Contact her at sglickman@mathematica-mpr.com.