ICYMI: Inpatient Quality Reporting notice from CMS

The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has contracted with Mathematica to develop, electronically specify, and maintain process and structural measures that assess clinical quality in several hospital quality improvement programs.

They are identifying hospitals interested in testing the Safe Use of Opioids – Concurrent Prescribing electronic clinical quality measure (eCQM), which is included in the CMS Hospital Inpatient Quality Reporting program. This measure aims to reduce preventable mortality, the risk of respiratory depression, and the costs associated with adverse events related to opioid use. It encourages providers to identify patients with concurrent prescriptions of opioids or opioids and benzodiazepines and discourages the inappropriate prescribing of two or more opioids or opioids and benzodiazepines concurrently.

They are offering your hospital up to $5,000 to participate in testing the measure. We plan to conduct testing between November 2021 and January 2022.

Mathematica is seeking hospitals with both inpatient and outpatient settings that are interested in:

  1. Sending extracted electronic health record data needed to calculate the measure
  2. Participating in a manual data abstraction to ensure the measure’s data elements are correct and the measure score accurately reflects the quality of care provided
  3. Completing a scorecard on the feasibility of collecting the necessary data elements
  4. Participating in clinician interviews about the measure topic

To learn more about this testing opportunity, please reach out to EBickel@mathematica-mpr.com and TLutz@mathematica-mpr.com