Partnership accelerates Alliance reporting on quality and cost
We are pleased to announce that the Alliance has been selected by the Washington State Health Care Authority to lead implementation of the Washington State Common Measure Set for Health Care Quality and Cost, and that the Alliance’s Community Checkup website will host the publicly available results going forward. The starter set of more than 50 measures will enable a common way of tracking important elements of health and health care performance and will inform public and private health care purchasing. Dorothy Teeter, Washington State Health Care Authority Director, spoke this week at our members-only All-Alliance meeting about how the Common Measure Set fits in to the state’s health innovation strategy.
Both national and regional leaders are calling for more alignment and streamlining in quality measurement. This has become an even more urgent goal as more payers, including Centers for Medicare & Medicaid, move to value-based payment models. The Alliance-led workgroups that recommended the 50+ measures took this into account in their selection process, and this was further considered by the Governor-appointed Performance Measures Coordinating Committee who took final action to approve the measure set.
This work continues what the Alliance started in 2008 with our first public report on quality. By reporting on quality and safety, appropriate use, patient experience, potentially avoidable utilization and eventually price, we will be able to more accurately identify where purchasers and consumers can get better value in health care. Speaking of price, we are getting ready to share the latest version of our report on health care price variation in Washington state with the Alliance’s purchaser members. This report looks at the range of price levels at delivery systems and attendant professional services for a number of different high-volume hospitalizations. Due to anti-trust restrictions, we are unable to share this data publicly. We look forward to the day, however, when under a new state-mandated APCD, we can share price data publicly like Medicare is now doing with hospital prices for common procedures.
This is an exciting time for both the Alliance and the health care market. We will continue to update you on our work and invite you to be part of it. Thank you for your ongoing partnership and support.