For Physicians
How is the Pennsylvania Health Care Quality Alliance accomplishing its goals?
Over the past 12 months, the Pennsylvania Health Care Quality Alliance (PHCQA) has been working to identify a measure set which best represent a fair and valid approach to hospital quality performance measurement. Accordingly, physician leaders from Pennsylvania's hospitals, the Pennsylvania Medical Society, the state's four Blue plans, and the state and regional hospital associations assembled several workgroups to facilitate work of creating a standardized approach to quality measurement:
Measures and Methods Workgroup
The Measures and Methods Workgroup is a group of physicians, biostatisticians, hospital performance staff members, and health plan representatives who are responsible for evaluating measures, recommending the panel of measures, creating specifications and definitions, determining data sources, and collecting and analyzing methods for measures.
Reporting and Marketing Workgroup
The Reporting and Marketing Workgroup consists of hospital and health plan IT personnel, quality reporting staff members, health care marketing professionals, and web design/development staff responsible for creating and/or selecting the reporting platform, format, tools, output, and the website, as well as supporting communication and marketing strategies.
Ad Hoc Workgroups
A variety of ad hoc groups have been created to support the work of the PHCQA. To date, these have included a Data Management Advisory Group to assist with the selection of a data management and reporting vendor and a PR Task Force to make recommendations on public relations matters and external communications.
What process is being used to develop the overall approach?
The Measures and Methods Workgroup began its work by gathering and reviewing a comprehensive collection of existing hospital quality measures that are already reported to state or federal entities by Pennsylvania hospitals. More specifically, measures needed to meet the following requirements to be considered for selection:
- Measures should be already reported and preferably available through public data sources — Given the initial time and resource constraints, PHCQA needed to limit the selected measures to ones that already exist or can be derived from existing data sources, and not via raw data collection or proprietary sources.
- Measures should be endorsed by national organizations and already recognized as being valid measures of hospital quality — To secure the credibility of PHCQA's first report, only measures that have already been established individually as being good indicators of quality will be considered.
- Measures should be evidence-based and include process and outcome measures - The measures should be ones supported by clinical studies and existing literature, and combined together, should reflect as many of the dimensions of quality (e.g. Donabedian Model, IOM) as possible.
The PHCQA's efforts to date have initially focused on hospital metrics/measures, largely because of the long history of public reporting on hospital care in Pennsylvania. However, we believe that this initiative must evolve over time to include measures covering the whole episode of care, across a variety of settings. A key overall goal of the PHCQA is to continue to build on the strong physician-hospital partnership to improve care and patent outcomes, particularly for individuals with chronic conditions.
Over the six months, we will continue to enhance and modify the tools and information sources in the website to allow hospitals/providers to participate in the collaborative process and help advance our mutually shared objectives for creating a high level of quality in Pennsylvania's health care delivery.
How can you get involved?
If you are interested in getting involved or contributing to this effort, please contact one of the following individuals:
General PHCQA Inquiries:
Gerald Miller, Chair, PHCQA
(610) 338-8211 or Gerald.Miller@crozer.org
Erik Muther, Executive Director, PHCQA
(215) 241-3097 or Erik.Muther@phcqa.org
Measures and Methods Workgroup:
Patrick (P.J.) Brennan, MD, Chief Medical Officer & Senior Vice President, University of Pennsylvania Health System
(215) 349-5258
Reporting and Marketing Workgroup:
David F. Simon, Esq., Senior Vice President & General Counsel, Jefferson Health System
(610) 225-6298 or simond@jhsmail.org
Public and Media Relations:
Richard Wells, Principal, The Wellynn Group
(610) 667-2382
