Data Quality Measures In Healthcare

Data give the picture of what is happening.

Data quality measures in healthcare. Creating quality measures in health care is the practice of using data to assess hospital and health systems performance based on various quality standards. Outcome measures reflect the impact of the health care service or intervention on the health status of patients. Cms implements quality initiatives to assure quality health care for medicare beneficiaries through accountability and public disclosure. Health care quality measurement for children is the process of using a scientifically sound tool to assess the extent to which children are receiving quality health care in any of the iom quality domains.

I offer perspective on some of the gaps in current approaches to measuring healthcare quality. The majority of health care quality measures used for public reporting are process measures. There are many definitions of data quality but data is generally considered high quality if it is fit for its intended uses in operations decision making and planning. Given the scale of the healthcare sector and the numerous different quality measures from numerous different sources settling on a set of metrics that can credibly represent health system quality and can be measured through existing records or reasonable data collection efforts is a daunting task.

Measure evaluation understood that data must be of high quality if they are to be relied upon for making good decisions on health policy health programs and allocation of scarce resources. Bad data call the entire system into question. Moreover data is deemed of high quality if it correctly represents the real world construct to which it refers. Measuring health care quality isn t nearly as straightforward as many think it is.

Cms uses quality measures in its various quality initiatives that include quality improvement. Data quality refers to the state of qualitative or quantitative pieces of information. The percentage of patients who died as a result of surgery surgical mortality rates. Quality measures are critical to any healthcare facility s strategic planning because they point to where a facility is excelling and where it can improve.

These measures also tend to drive other measures within organizations because they indicate how a hospital should shift its finances and resources. Outcome measures are frequently reported to the government commercial payers and organizations that report on quality such as the leapfrog group a national nonprofit that evaluates and. Outcome measures mortality readmission patient experience etc are the quality and cost targets healthcare organizations are trying to improve.