title: Guiding principles and checklist for population-based quality metrics.
abstract: The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services oversees the ESRD Quality Incentive Program to ensure that the highest quality of health care is provided by outpatient dialysis facilities that treat patients with ESRD. To that end, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services uses clinical performance measures to evaluate quality of care under a pay-for-performance or value-based purchasing model. Now more than ever, the ESRD therapeutic area serves as the vanguard of health care delivery. By translating medical evidence into clinical performance measures, the ESRD Prospective Payment System became the first disease-specific sector using the pay-for-performance model. A major challenge for the creation and implementation of clinical performance measures is the adjustments that are necessary to transition from taking care of individual patients to managing the care of patient populations. The National Quality Forum and others have developed effective and appropriate population-based clinical performance measures quality metrics that can be aggregated at the physician, hospital, dialysis facility, nursing home, or surgery center level. Clinical performance measures considered for endorsement by the National Quality Forum are evaluated using five key criteria: evidence, performance gap, and priority (impact); reliability; validity; feasibility; and usability and use. We have developed a checklist of special considerations for clinical performance measure development according to these National Quality Forum criteria. Although the checklist is focused on ESRD, it could also have broad application to chronic disease states, where health care delivery organizations seek to enhance quality, safety, and efficiency of their services. Clinical performance measures are likely to become the norm for tracking performance for health care insurers. Thus, it is critical that the methodologies used to develop such metrics serve the payer and the provider and most importantly, reflect what represents the best care to improve patient outcomes.
authors.affiliation: DaVita Clinical Research, DaVita HealthCare Partners Inc., Denver, Colorado; Mahesh.Krishnan@Davita.com.
authors.forename: Mahesh
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Krishnan
authors.affiliation: DaVita Clinical Research, DaVita HealthCare Partners Inc., Denver, Colorado;
authors.forename: Steven M
authors.initials: SM
authors.lastname: Brunelli
authors.affiliation: Clinical and Scientific Affairs, and.
authors.forename: Franklin W
authors.initials: FW
authors.lastname: Maddux
authors.affiliation: Renal Ventures Management, Lakewood, Colorado;
authors.forename: Thomas F
authors.initials: TF
authors.lastname: Parker
authors.affiliation: Dialysis Clinic, Inc., Nashville, Tennessee; and.
authors.forename: Douglas
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Johnson
authors.affiliation: DaVita Clinical Research, DaVita HealthCare Partners Inc., Denver, Colorado;
authors.forename: Allen R
authors.initials: AR
authors.lastname: Nissenson
authors.affiliation: Chronic Disease Research Group, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
authors.forename: Allan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Collins
authors.affiliation: Clinical Science, Epidemiology, and Research, Fresenius Medical Care North America, Waltham, Massachusetts;
authors.forename: Eduardo
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Lacson
mesh_terms: D057189:Checklist; D019317:Evidence-Based Medicine; D006801:Humans; D007676:Kidney Failure, Chronic / Q000628:therapy; D010043:Outcome and Process Assessment, Health Care; D011445:Prospective Payment System; D058996:Quality Improvement; D019984:Quality Indicators, Health Care / Q000592:standards*; D006435:Renal Dialysis / Q000592:standards; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D014481:United States; D054928:Validation Studies as Topic
keywords: anemia; calcium; dialysis; hospitalization; parathyroid hormone