The healthcare system has a robust centrally controlled quality measurement program, with a wide array of quality measures across various healthcare conditions.
There are many organizations involved in quality measurement for acute stroke, and a complex landscape of quality measures exists.
ISO 25023 - Measurement of system and software product quality, provides a set of quality measures for the characteristics of system/software products that can be used for specifying requirements, measuring and evaluating the system/software product quality [17].
And even this champion of "quality measures" — vital to the Obama administration's goal of paying doctors based on outcomes, not the amount of care — has found that it is not always easy to meet them.
But Dr. Omenn said the proposals could actually reduce the burden by establishing one set of quality measures that would be used by all six programs and perhaps by private insurers as well.
The site also incorporates rankings from the federal "nursing home compare" tool provided by the federal Medicare.gov Web site, which ranks licensed nursing homes on a variety of quality measures.
"Many doctors feel like they are on a treadmill and are running scared because of malpractice and having to check off all the checkboxes of quality measures," Dr. Chou said.
In March, cancer organizations including the National Quality Forum tried to address the problem by issuing the first set of quality measures that can be used to judge whether hospitals are giving patients up-to-date care for breast and colon tumors, two of the most common cancers.
Indeed, for the past two years, the top-ranked primary-care doctor out of WellMed's fifteen hundred — according to a wide range of quality measures, such as the percentage of patients with well-controlled blood pressure and diabetes, rates of emergency-room visits and hospital readmissions, and levels of patient satisfaction — has been a McAllen physician.
In October, 2012, Medicare débuted a new hospital-payment system, known as Value-Based Purchasing, which ties a portion of hospital reimbursement to scores on a host of quality measures; thirty per cent of the hospital's score is based on patient satisfaction.
Knowledge of quality measures in endoscopy among trainees is unknown.
