Prioritizing the quality indicators that matter most

With resources for making quality improvements limited, there is a need to prioritize which quality indicators most effectively impact population health, according to a study published in Health Affairs.

There are more than 2,100 measures in the 2013 Department of Health and Human Services National Quality Measures Clearinghouse and more than 250 measures in the 2012 Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality National Healthcare Quality and Disparities Reports, according to the study.

“Spending on quality improvement generally implies a trade-off against other activities, and focusing on specific quality indicators may divert resources away from other indicators or other components of healthcare,” wrote David O. Meltzer, associate professor in the department of general internal medicine, University of Chicago, and colleagues. As such, they proposed a conceptual and methodological framework to quantify the improvements in population health that may result from reporting healthcare quality indicators.

In their study, Metlzer and his team analyzed 13 AHRQ quality indictors with readily available data on the benefits of indicator reporting. They found that seven of them account for 93 percent of total benefits, while the remaining six account for only 7 percent of total benefits.

“Use of a framework such as this could focus resources on indicators having the greatest expected impact on population health,” wrote Meltzer et al.