Overview

As a result of rapid growth in hospice and palliative care, local, regional and national efforts are being made by healthcare leaders to promote quality and reduce variation in hospice and palliative medicine services.  The AAHPM created and maintains this Quality Portal to provide quality measurement and improvement resources for palliative medicine clinicians and administrators across the nation.  Within this portal, users will find the latest research, measurement tools, guidelines, and peer-reviewed advice to develop quality measurement and improvement interventions for their programs.

We hope that you will find this web site effective in meeting your programmatic needs.  Please use the contact form on the Quality Community page to submit suggestions and recommendations to improve the usefulness of this portal.  Thank you.

Quality Resources

To find standards, benchmarks, and clinical measures to use in measuring and improving program quality, go to Guidelines, Standards, Measures

To find CME with a quality improvement focus (sometimes, but not always specifically in hospice and palliative medicine), go to: CME resources

For suggested references and slide sets from selected presentations at AAHPM educational meetings, go to: Resources

Opportunities to Participate in Quality Initiatives

On May 22, 2012, the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute issued Funding Announcements in support of its National Priorities for Research and Research Agenda.  Application guidelines can be found here.

To join in collaborative performance improvement projects targeting hospice and palliative care indicators, go to
PI Projects to Join

News About Quality of Interest to Hospice and Palliative Medicine

Comment Period on Health IT Enabled Quality Measurement Extended to September 21
AHRQ has issued a one-month extension on ways to improve quality measurement through health IT in the Federal Register for "Request for Information (RFI) on Quality Measurement Enabled by Health IT." The RFI seeks ideas and input from stakeholders such as health IT system developers, vendors, payers, quality measure developers, clinicians, and health care consumers, on successful strategies and remaining challenges in the creation of health IT-enabled quality measure development and reporting.

Access an AHRQ-hosted webinar which provided background on the RFI and highlights of the report Quality Measurement Enabled by Health IT: Overview, Possibilities, and Challenges.  Access the background report.  Access the August 22 Federal Register notice extending the comment period.

Health IT Enables Quality Measurement, but Obstacles Remain
AHRQ-funded research helped produce a range of improvements in how to measure quality using health information (IT) technologies, which are captured in a new report. Based on the experiences of 17 researchers, the synthesis report, Findings and Lessons from the Enabling Quality Measurement Through Health IT Grant Initiative, incorporates results from AHRQ-funded grants that examined the development of electronic quality measures, methods of capturing and integrating quality data in electronic health records (EHRs), the accuracy of IT-enabled measurements, methods for providing meaningful feedback to clinicians, and ways that health IT could improve the efficiency of quality measurement. In one example, Rainu Kaushal, M.D., of Weill Cornell Medical College led an initiative to generate and test the reliability of prioritized quality measures. Fifteen of these measures were subsequently included in Stage 1 Meaningful Use requirements.

Access Dr. Kaushal's video here.  A second example describes how data can be transformed into meaningful feedback that clinicians can use to improve practice. Judith Logan, M.D., of Oregon Health Sciences University worked with clinicians to generate and report prioritized quality measures through interactive Web-based quality reports. View Dr. Logan's video.  To learn more about these projects, read their success stories.  Read the full synthesis report.

CMS Updates Information on Hospice Quality Reporting
The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has updated its Hospice Quality Reporting website to include information on the transition from the Voluntary Reporting Period to the First Year of Required Reporting. Click on "Spotlight & Announcements" for updates regarding program requirements and to access a "Hospice Quality Reporting Fact Sheet" (under "downloads" at the bottom of the page).

Items of Interest

The report by the National Quality Forum Measure Application Partnership on performance measurement for hospice and palliative care is now available.

The final report of the National Quality Forum project "National Voluntary Consensus Standards for Palliative Care and End-of-Life Care" is available to download.

The summary of palliative and end-of-life measures endorsed in 2012 by the National Quality Forum is available.

Quality Community
Coming Soon!

Join a discussion board or list serve to post news, ask questions, provide information relevant to

• measure developers and quality researchers

• users of quality and performance improvement measures.