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

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 slidesets from selected presentations at AAHPM educational meetings, go to: Resources

News About Quality of Interest to Hospice and Palliative Medicine

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.